Saturday, August 30, 2008

Status...

I've not done anything this past week as I've been fixing a friends machine (and been knackered to boot!), so I've made no progress from what I reported last time.

However I was thinking.... I got a question a while ago about my tools being runable on Mac/Linux and I said probably not, but that might not be true. You see the thing about C# and .NET is that you can just use it as a C/C++ compiler as C# will happily do whats called unsafe code; thats basically where you use pointers again. Now what this means is I can port SNASM and possibly Minus4 into a C#/.NET environment and get it compiling, and it would then magically work on other platforms!

You see the thing about .NET is that its a virtual state machine, so you compile your code for a mythical CPU. This is then JIT (Just In Time) compiled when the program runs - much like Java is. This means my plain ol' C++ program would run quite happily under Mono on Mac or Linux. If I get a chance, I'll give this a go and see how I get on. Once its in a C# project I can then slowly port it properly to C# without all the pain.

(And yes...I know theres a managed C++ for .NET, but C/C++ sucks and I'd rather use C# these days...)

4 comments:

Gaia said...

Hm... sounds cool, Mike! And please tell me why o why C++ sucks these days? :-)

Mike said...

Well, if you've ever used C# in anger - as at work for a prolonged period of time, you get used to it and all its cool features. C++ misses all of them, but Ill be very happy if I never EVER have to make another header file ever again!!

I do still use bits of C/C++ at work, and its damn annoying. C# rocks so much, its just not funny. :)

Gaia said...

Now that you're saying (by the way it's Gaia here ;-) I fonkin hate header files, too! In fact I use a lot of .NET these days at work and it is sooo comfortable.

I am very much interested in making a real good IDE for the CBM machines, and I love to see yours, so in case there's a way I can help... :-)

BTW, there's a rather good public source code editor written in C# called FireEdit.

Mike said...

Well, I'm not doing an IDE - just a proper debugger. IDE's are ticky because people like what the like and its hard to get them to swap unless they have no choice.

I know lots of people that still use an independant editor rather than DevStudio's own, and DevStudio is great these days.

That said... I do hope the debugger will be adpoted by developers and emulator writers alike as it'll provide a rich feature set without them having to write anything at all.