[DotGNU]Portable.NET status (3 May 2002)

[Rhys Weatherley]

I've been working on pnet mostly this week, fixing bugs
and stuff.  The "new" operator for arrays now works in
the compiler, a more obvious error indication is given if
a compiler component SEGV's, and I'm beginning work
on attributes (at last).

Many thanks (or should that be curses?) to Gopal for finding
lots of gnarly problems in the compiler and assembler that
had me scratching my head for hours. :-)

The main new stuff is in the area of threading: I rearranged
the code I was working on last week to share more of it
between systems.  Porting threading should be a lot easier
now, as only a small handful of primitives must be ported.

My plan with threading is to do most of the work in "support"
before I integrate it in the engine.  I'm building an extensive
test suite (tests/test_thread.c) to bang on every conceivable
corner case.  Threading is hard to get right in a VM, so it's
best to make things bullet-proof before throwing it into the
engine core.

I did a little bit of work on System.Reflection.Emit, but I
haven't checked it in just yet.

No official release this week.  My Web hosting provider
changed servers, and I can't upload new files at the moment.
This will hopefully be fixed soon.

There are lots of bugs, missing features, and stuff that people
can help out with.  Grep the pnet tree for "TODO".  They are
all pretty well marked.

Cheers,

Rhys.