World: r4wp

FYI: I got my RPi video problem fixed, still no network, but I will 
go buy a  long network cable tomorrow, so I should finally be able 
to look into the issues Kaj submitted. I would like to fix the main 
ones before releasing v0.3.0.

I would like that very much, too

thnx for applying the fix & support. One day I will be able to github 
on my own ;)

Doc - web seems to stopped displaying twitter news messages?

I noticed, you tweeted, that 0.3.0 is close?

btw - once 0.3.0 is out, what about a blog post, summing what is 
already available? Maybe a short script? btw - do we have conditions/branching 
and loops yet?

Twitter message on web site: that's blogger's widget for Twitter's 
feeds...can't do much about it.

Yes, v0.3.0 is close. Of course, I will write a blog post for that 
release, it's a major one. Condition/branching/loops: that's what's 
implied (among other things) by being "Turing-complete". Also, a 
quick look at last 10 days of commit in v0.3.0 branch should answer 
your question too. ;-)

I can't decode anything from inspecting the sources yet. I can look 
into natives, there are some forall-loop etc functions whose purpose 
I don't understand. Then I can see datatypes, but where should I 
look for the definition of 'if, 'either, 'until, 'forall, 'while, 
etc.? :-)

Click on the commit messages where they were implemented

Pekr: look into the commits list, not in the source code.

Does the modulus operator work on floats at the moment?

Yes (both modulus and remainder operators). Of course, this is for 
Red/System, Red doesn't have yet floats support.

*** Compilation Error: argument type mismatch on calling: //
*** expected: [number!], found: [float!]

print [4.0 // 2.0]

I've been looking at the compiler source for about an hour

by commit list, do you mean eg. https://github.com/dockimbel/Red/commits/v0.3.0

?

Pekr: yes

Yes

I tried changing the modulus types to any-number! -- runtime error

but I don't know what I'm doing

Nicolas: it is very possible that we have forgot to add unit tests 
for that feature. Obsviously, it's a bug, so please report it to 
github tracker so we can fix it asap.

number! is a virtual type used only internally by Red/System compiler.

It looks like a minor type checking bug, so it should be quickly 
fixed.

cool. I'll do that now

We don't have any tests for // for float. I'll look into it.

Red [] 4.0 // 2.0  compiles and runs.

Sorry - Red/System[] 4.0 // 2.0 compiles and runs.

Red/System[] f: 4.0 // 2.0 gives the type mismatch compile error.

Nicolas: issue fixed.

thanks man

Just as a reminder, once we fix the current ARM bugs, we would need 
to add Red to the following page: http://elinux.org/RPi_Programming

(Red/System could already be added though)

I've dropped the C library dependency from all bindings that don't 
strictly need it, to minimise the code base. However, the only binding 
I could get to work somewhat inlined in Red is SQLite, because it's 
little more than the imports

I've implemented floating point support in the SDL binding. This 
is used for audio conversions

I'm fixing the Unicode string printing issues on Linux/ARM...will 
post the fixes tonight.


BTW, I've now an ARMHF image installed, so I'll work very soon on 
supporting ARMHF ABI.

Great

what is this ABI about? Is that about supporting advantage of having 
HW floating point unit available?

I expect it being unrelated to Thumb support?

It's basically unrelated to Thumb. It's not necessarily about hardware 
floating point, either, but it's a different way of supporting it

It's about dealing with different Linux kernel incompatible ABI for 
float support on ARM platforms. Red/System uses the FPU unit (named 
VFP in ARM family) directly, but when having to pass/receive float 
arguments from libc or 3rd-party libs, Red/System needs to do it 
respecting the installed system ABI, which might be `softfp` or `hardfp` 
(there's a third one, but it's for not a concern for us). 


Currently, Red/System floats are passed using the `softfp` convention, 
so it works only on ARMEL platforms (while ARMHF platforms require 
`hardfp` convention). `hardfp` is a much more performant, while `softfp` 
is for legacy  systems or systems with no FPU unit).

BTW, Red or Red/System apps that do not use floats seems to work 
well with both ABI.

So - lots of work to support ARMHF?

And also - do I need to know, which platform I need to support, or 
support can be in one exe, for both worlds?

You can't mix different ABI in one binary.

ARMHF: a little, it's the same work as the one done in IA-32 faster-float 
old branch. In a nutshell, it consists in passing float arguments 
in FPU registers directly instead of using the stack.

We'll provide compilation options and various additional targets 
to deal with those different ABI.

Are there different Android platforms as well?

AFAIK, Android libs uses softfp convention.