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...)
Hm... sounds cool, Mike! And please tell me why o why C++ sucks these days? :-)
ReplyDeleteWell, 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!!
ReplyDeleteI do still use bits of C/C++ at work, and its damn annoying. C# rocks so much, its just not funny. :)
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.