[DotGNU]Reminder - Weekly DotGNU Meeting

[Gopal V]

DotGNU holds weekly meetings to discuss any issues
of relevance; to allow the developers to catch up
with each other; and to allow new members to ask
questions and find out how to join in.

The meetings are conducted via IRC in the channel
#dotgnu on irc.openprojects.net at the following
times:

    Saturday 1000 UTC
    Saturday 2200 UTC

The first is best for DotGNU members east of UTC
and the second is best for DotGNU members west
of UTC.  Some of the key DotGNU members attend
both meetings.

The logs of #dotgnu are always available here:

http://ajmitch.dhis.org/dotgnu/

Note: the times are UTC, not GMT.  That is, they
do not include daylight savings adjustments during
the northern summer.  If you have a Unix system,
then the command "date; date -u" will give you
your current time in both local and UTC, allowing
you do determine when the next meeting will occur.

(Rhys)
---------------------------------------------------

*) Portable.Net Release 0.4.8  
        Why ? ... Because we have to ! ... We can't hold it
back any longer . We can finally compile pnetlib with cscc 
and yet 1 month ago Rhys (Oct - 26th) had announced that 
he was looking elsewhere for something interesting ... This 
proves that Portable.Net has a community behind it to take
the heat when the fat is on fire .... (*enough cliches ?*)

To continue, We're still not into self bootstrapping .. Our 
compiler still cannot compile itself ... But the question is 
"Do we want to ? " .... The answer that came was an emphatic
"NO !".... So our C compiler stands with a hole in the head
for the moment and we push on with the C# compiler .....

Ok, now that I have exhausted my store of bilge , let me
get serious ... So the rest of the items really are worth 
reading..

*) Supporting Win32 directly
    The users of Portable.Net have long been clamouring about
win32 support ... Scandium (IRC nick) has suggested that we use
the NullSoft's Opensource Installer to do the packaging .. So
now the question is ... how long will it take for pnet to be 
compilable with Mingw32 ... (Add to target for 0.5.0)

*) Helping with the class libraries
        Thankfully I have been recieving patches from a number of
people about Pnetlib ... So let's all get together and get 
hacking on the class libraries ... If you have any doubts about
this please ask at the meeting ..

*) Testcases
        Writing test cases in CSUnit should be easy and even trivial,
but that's a great way to learn C# .. Try that today itself ...
(finding bugs is an entertaining way of keeping developers busy ;)

*) Runtime
        Where do we go now ? ... For speed , we need a full fledged
JIT ... This should be simpler to write for pnet than other engines
because Pnet already converts IL into a simple, type-less, pointer
based , non polymorphic bytecode -- the CVM ... So should we build
a CVM jit ?... and when do we start ?...

*) Flow control in the compiler
        Should be easy ... I just need some more feedback from the 
expert (Rhys) to make sure I'm not on a wild goose chase ...
I'll be stuck to that for most of the meet tomorrow...

After having said all that ... Come one , come all ... We're a 
big happy family on irc.openprojects.net#dotgnu ... Join in the
fun .. and bring lots of coffee .....

Gopal
-- 
The difference between insanity and genius is measured by success