Subversion and GCC

GCC would be moving to Subversion around this weekend. In general, I feel this is a good move and will probably help our prolific developers a lot. I do have concerns about its alarming usage of disc space relative to CVS though. As it is, my home PC is under a bit of a strain trying to squeeze in GCC mainline and gcjx-branch copies, not to mention snapshots of these that I actually use as working copies, on the hard disc partitions that I have provided to Linux. After the move to Subversion, I will have to make some adjustments to the disc partitions to fit all this stuff in.

However, this will probably have to wait as I would be on vacation in Ooty most of next week.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

SPAM

I made the mistake of inadvertently posting a single message to comp.compilers using my office email address and within a day I was being spammed hard! That account had remained SPAM free for almost three years and it is rather painful to see it in the hands of these idiots. Thankfully, Thunderbird is getting better and better every day at detecting this SPAM, so there is some relief.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

OpenOffice.org v2.0

I have been waiting for this release for quite some time now, so as soon as it came out, I downloaded the Linux tarball. To my horror, I find that unlike previous releases it does not contain a simple installer but many RPMs! Why did they have to do this? It is so silly. An alternative for me is to build it from sources, but I do not have the energy or the enthusiasm to do it. Sheesh!


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Dumping Parse Trees

GCJX now accepts an "-fdump-tree" option that prints out the abstract syntax tree of a Java source file to stdout.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

A Walk Among The Trees

I implemented a simple pretty-printer for the AST used in GCJX over this weekend. It works just like the debug_tree() function in GCC and is accessed by using the dump_tree() function in GCJX. For convenience, I just change "-fdump-methods" to call dump_tree() instead of dump_method(). That way I can easily see the ASTs created for various Java source files. For someone like me who is new to GCJX in particular and compiler construction in general, this can be quite enlightening.

While debugging the GCJ front-end, I have found debug_tree() to be an immensely useful tool. I hope dump_tree() proves similarly useful for GCJX.


By the way, I added a small page to the GCC Wiki describing how to go about debugging GCJX.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Digital Nirvana

Apple, Google and Microsoft want to liberate us from the tyranny of folders and file names. You would never have to remember the name of a file or the folder in which you put it in to retrieve it. In a way, this is already how a lot of us use the Internet - I for one, just Google for a page rather than bookmark it and try to locate it within my labyrinthine bookmarks folder. This is good and I appreciate it. However, unlike the World Wide Web, your desktop PC would some time run out of disc space. When that happens, you can either just buy another hard disc or try to clean your existing hard disc. If you choose the latter, how do you find stuff you do not want? These tools make it easy for you to find stuff you want but not what you do not want.


IBM has created a Universal Virtual Computer to solve the problem of digital decay. Does any one else think this is an overkill? Is using well-documented document or image formats with portable reference reader implementations not good enough? What is to stop subtle errors in porting the UVC to new platforms from preventing the documents to be displayed as originally intended?


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

The American Prophet

When the leader of the most powerful nation on this planet talks like this, you desperately wish it is not true.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Madness

After "7/7", Britain seems to have gone bonkers just like the US did after "9/11". If you have access to the latest issue of The Economist, also read "Conference kick-out" in the "Britain" section. Sheesh!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)