Re: Portable bitwise operations library (was Re: Portability Considerations)

[Alice Osako]

john o goyo:
> On 2024-03-21 20:47, Alice Osako wrote:
> > [...] while the comp.lang.modula2 appears to be moribund (like most 
> > of USENET these days).
>
> I would not write off c.l.modula2 so quickly.  True, not much traffic 
> but I find people will respond to questions.
Ah, that's good to hear.

I've finished the GCC Modula-2 implementation for x86_64, at least as 
far as I can tell. I may have overlooked something, but I don't believe so.

I've re-written the test suite to be somewhat more systematic, and while 
it is still pretty ad-hoc it does at least exercise all of the 
procedures and functions defined in the API (at least, I think it does, 
I may have missed something somewhere). I've diffed the voluminous 
output of the tests for both of the implementations (through the simple 
expedient of redirecting the output to a pair of text files), and they 
now are in agreement, so I can at least say that if they are flawed, 
then both are flawed in the same ways.

I don't really know where to go from here; I imagine I should download 
some other compilers and see what I can do for those, though I am a not 
certain how much I can really do for any of them. If anyone wishes to 
contribute, feel free to fork the library and issue pull requests, I 
suppose.

Any advice on improving the test suite would be appreciated as well. As 
far as I know, no one has written a unit test framework for Modula-2 to 
date, and I would be well out of my depth in trying to write one myself. 
I would be wary of trying to apply any CI tools as I have never really 
worked with any of them before, and while I do intend to learn at least 
one at some point, this probably isn't the time to undertake yet another 
large effort.

For my own part, I would prefer to get back on track with the UNICODE 
library, and slowly unwind the stack for the project I set out to do in 
the first place (a Modula-2 implementation of MAL, for those who have 
forgotten - see https://github.com/kanaka/mal for the process details if 
you are curious). However, I seem to have committed myself to at least 
maintaining the bit manipulation library for the foreseeable future, and 
there remains work to be done on that, so that may have to wait a while 
longer.