[DotGNU]Portable.NET status 24 August 2002

[Rhys Weatherley]

It's been a fairly productive week on the C compiler.  Most
of the core language is implemented now.  The main outstanding
issue is variable initializers (arrays and global variables).

The linker is also nearly ready.  It can link programs that
contain multiple object files, but you still need to be careful
not to reuse the same symbol (e.g. structs, static variables)
in more than one file.  Fixing the linker is next on my TODO list.

I also fixed some bugs related to cygwin 1.3, so pnet should
build out of the box on that platform now.

On the C# front, it is now possible to write global functions
in C# that can be directly accessed from C code.  This makes
interoperability a lot easier.  e.g.

----------------------------------------------------------
    __module
    {
        public static void my_func()
        {
            ...
        }
    }
----------------------------------------------------------

This makes "my_func" visible from C as a global function.
All of the usual C# constructs can be used.

The pnetC library now has quite a few functions from
unistd.h, string.h, and strings.h.

All changes can be found in CVS.  No official release this
week, but hopefully next week once I've ironed out the
remaining linker issues.

Cheers,

Rhys.