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It’s been a while since my last post, sorry for that, I’ve been quite busy at university. Read on for some news about me as a Linux-based developer, stack machines, consoles and more.
Linux
After my long journey during which I tried Debian, Gentoo, OpenSUSE and Archlinux I eventually installed Ubuntu Linux (Dapper Drake 6.06) on my notebook which is also the first Linux that worked nearly right out of the box (except it didn’t recognize my notebook monitor). There are still some minor things left to fix, notably:
- WLAN is not working because my WLAN button is software only and acer_acpi refuses to compile (args!)
- tetex is broken (Link)
Hopefully both things will be sorted out during time. All in all, I’m quite pleased with Linux for my development work. Some things could be of course better (GCC’s error messages … I like Microsoft’s VC++ more with its Cxxxx error for which you can usually find an example case on the MSDN) but all in all I’m already quite productive under Linux. I’ve written three university homeworks during the last two weeks, and didn’t hit any larger problem during that time.
What I really like is callgrind/valgrind, I’d love to see something like that bundled with the Visual Studio Professional. Currently, I’m forced to use make for building, but I plan to start using SCons soon. Although make is a powerful tool, I like the concepts behind SCons more.
The latest university homework was (actually, it still is) a simple Linux shell. It’s quite similar to what I want to use in niven, so I decided to implement a bit more stuff than required. Anyway, implementing stuff like a shell in plain, C89 C is really a pain. I’m really looking forward to porting it to C++ which should also give me an extra bit of flexibility. The shell comes also with a complete stack/register-machine similar to what I plan for niven’s script VM. It turned out to be rather simple to write the stack/register-machine backend. During the next few weeks, I’ll try to write a front-end compiler for it that takes some kind of high-level code and generates stack/register-machine opcodes. As I don’t know yet how this is supposed to work, I think it’ll be quite interesting 
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Related posts:
Jap, die Sache mit den unsinnigen Softwarebuttons an Notebooks ist schon Käse.
Gut ich kann das für belegbare Sondertasten verstehen – aber wozu so einen Käse bei der WLAN-Taste??
Aber bestimmt war es billiger, das in Software zu realisieren als eine echt Leitung zur WlanKarte zu ziehen.
Versteh einer die Hersteller.
Aber nur, weil du unter Linux programmierst, bist du noch lange kein Linux developer!
scho – ich mein wenn ich Windows developer sach dann meint ja auch keiner ich tu windows entwickeln
… naja ich habs mal vorsichtiger formuliert damit da keiner drüber stolpert.
btw ich hab mit SCons was gemacht – ist wirklich cool.
jojo, das mit Scons hab ich schon gesehen.
Aber da finde ich eine Makedatei irgendwie gesprächiger.
Diese SConfigure unserer mini_sh ist ja schon fast “black magic”.
Das liegt halt daran das SCons .c dateien kennt – und weiss wie man damit umgehen muss. make ist da ja eher “dumm” im vergleich …