The Pascal system is working well and I’m really happy with it, aside from a glitch in constructors I’m currently trying to solve.
The GUI bindings are mostly complete and mostly work well, once I’ve solved my issues with making the language more extensible it should be really easy to keep adding desktop & usability festyres.
The relatively slow chips like the K1 I’ve been using so far are actually performing quite well, they are not really too slow for most tasks at all, so I’m very keen to see what’s possible when that power is doubled and maybe doubled again.
Most of the GUI now has bindings to Pascal, but further work is needed improving the compiler to make it useful for everyday work.
The new compiler fits it’s intended purpose very well, compiling small desktop apps in an instant bypassing the preprocessing & linking time typical of C compilers. It’s much faster than my custom C backend, which in turn operates faster than typical compilers.
Once the GUI toolkit has full Pascal bindings I’ll also be able to get back to improving the core desktop system. The new compiler should make development of apps much smoother than coding everything in C, but it will also require some more work to make it convenient.
Work on the Pascal system is going excellently, the compiler seems to scale well so far. This will help to build a fast & stable desktop environment with more graphical apps, and also with more fonts & visual improvements.
The stupid racist child raping pieces of shit known as the NSW Police force come to my house harassing me over some crackheads shit all the time and they fucking hum like a radio tower as they’re pulling up.
They should safety test their equipment as it must surely be irradiating them!
Expected 1.0 compiler features:
Some things will be missing or limited in early versions:
This is just an overview of my new compiler (still in development…)
The compiler was initially developed from and as my spreadsheet formula parser, so it handles the familiar row/column formula style as well as Pascal-style programs.
Initial versions won’t have full support for any legacy standards but will be reasonably compatible with other modern Pascals (especially FreePascal).
Future versions may also support compatibility options for legacy spreadsheet formats, but spreadsheet & database functionality isn’t finalised yet.
Support for modern features is prioritised over support for earlier Pascal standards, with object-oriented APIs for text processing and other things materialising slowly.
The compiler works like a simplified & modernised version of classic Pascal compilers, so existing reference material is applicable for porting & long-term maintenance.
The compiler and minimal runtime are not only written in plain C but are designed from the ground up for safely embedding in larger C/C++ applications.
The compiler works around a simplified p-code format close to modern CPU instructions, allowing for straightforward native-speed ports to typical processor architectures.
Nikola Tesla would have hated this creep with a vengeance.
Initial work testing scripting on the new “desktop” display system was done using Smalltalk, which I quite like, but is now slowly being moved over to a newly developed Pascal system integrated with the spreadsheet code. This will hopefully power typical business apps in the future particularly while my “flagship” tools are being perfected.
Parsing is working well but is not complete, the next step will be to have small programs running in a p-code style sandbox and then to improve features/performance in stages.