• Mood: awake
• Music: Various Artists - Star Trek Series - The Healing Process

ANTLR sucks...

...but it's also much more flexible/full-featured/easier-once-you-get-the-hang-of-it than bison/flex. I just wish it wouldn't be so damn finicky. Good documentation would help too. The ANTLR documentation is (a) ambiguous, (b) incomplete, and (c) sometimes just plain wrong. I regularly had to go digging through the ANTLR headers/source to figure out why things weren't working.

So I have a love/hate relationship with it. Yay compilers class ...

(23:03:01) CondorDes: huh. I suck at estimating times. :)
(23:03:05) CondorDes: Which is probably a good thing.
(23:03:27) Rob: what kind of time?
(23:04:00) CondorDes: I had two tasks today; first was finish the type checking part of the compiler and make it produce reasonable error messages, and second was to do return checking (i.e. make sure all paths through a function return a value)
(23:04:15) CondorDes: I figured the first would take an hour or two, max ... and I ended up spending most of the day on it.
(23:04:38) CondorDes: I figured the second would take at least several hours, and I just did it in about 20 minutes. ;P

>>> MetaFS

Making slow progress on MetaFS. I'm slowly transitioning it over to a more flexible VFS/plugin design (which is also more complex and thus somewhat slower, but that's life ... ::sigh::). Once that's done, I'm going to write an MP3/Ogg plugin (because new user-visible features are a good thing) and push 0.1.2. I'm guessing that won't happen for a good week or two though.

0.1.3 is going to be a bit more ambiguous, though. I'm seriously thinking about scrapping BerkeleyDB in favor of SQLite ... but I have a sneaking suspicion that SQLite is the reason amaroK runs so slowly. Such a tradeoff ... nice and fast (with a custom query engine, ugh) or slow and easy (just generate SQL queries)? Hmmmm. [Before any of you suggest it, a full-fledged RDBMS like PostgreSQL or -- $DEITY forbid -- MySQL is right out. This needs to be usable on desktop systems, which means easy to setup...]

In any case, I'm shooting for at least rudimentary indexing and searching in 0.1.3. But I guess we'll see ...

>>>

I'm turning into a regular socialite, which scares me. I have regularly-scheduled things Fri, Sat and Sun nights ... and this week I have stuff on Wed and Thurs, too. All of these involve eating out, for one reason or another ... I can hear my poor wallet screaming now ...

-- Des