The future or "what happened to release 0.4?"

[samiam95124]

The future or "what happened to release 0.4?"

So September marked the one year anniversary of the 0.3 release. Well, what defines a release?

1. The compiler passes hardness tests (spew).
2. An effort is made to knock down as many trivial bugs as possible.
3. All documentation is up to date, meaning that it represents the current state of the code.

Actually, it turns out most of that is easy except for #3. The reason why is not only are the documentation changes/additions extensive, but they are often self-cancelling. That is, documentation of features now will get changed or eliminated in the near future.

So what do I feel is important to get accomplished before a new release?

1. The wrapper effort for services, although fully functional, revealed the weaknesses of the current system. Having Pascal-P6 actually follow the System 5 AMD64 abi instead of "kinda follow it" would eliminate %90 of the work of creating wrappers for the system.
2. A cexternal or similar system would, again, greatly simplify the creation of wrappers as well as making the documentation much clearer. Instead of documenting the differences between Pascal-P6 calling conventions and Sys5 AMD64 conventions, it would change to "they are the same".

So the future?

Pascal-P6 has been very stable at running ISO 7185 Pascal programs. It has recently become much better at running Pascaline programs. Thus with some fairly simple improvements, I think it will become a general purpose compiler and worthy of a release.