This far better reflects the actual meaning. It is very likely that
ty_none is a holdover from long before there was full type encoding and
it meant that the union in qfcc's type_t had no data. This is still
true for basic types, but only if not a function, field or pointer type.
If the type was function, field or pointer, it was not true, so it was
misnamed pretty much from the start.
Only as scalars, I still need to think about what to do for vectors and
quaternions due to param size issues. Also, doubles are not yet
guaranteed to be correctly aligned.
Empty structs are now (correctly) invalid. The hack of using an empty
struct to represent a handle returned from a builtin has been unnecessary
since opaque structs were implemented: now a pointer to an opaque struct
can be used. This is mostly safe as handles are aways negative and thus
attempting to dereference such a pointer should result in a VM error. It
will be even safer once const is implemented and the pointers can be made
constant (eg, typedef struct handle * const handle;)
All internal structs now have "proper" names, and fit the naming convention
(eg, obj_module (like objective-c's types, but obj instead of objc). Some
redundant types got removed (holdovers from before proper struct tag
handling).
Also, it has proven to be unnecessary to build internal classes, so
make_class and make_class_struct are gone, too.
As class objects don't have retain counts (they're usually static, even!!),
allowing the instance implementations of retain, release, and autorelease
attempt to modify the non-existant retainCount would be a recipe for severe
headaches. We also don't want the retainCount returning "random" values.
Going by "standard" Objective-C, retainCount really doesn't belong in
Object itself. The way GNUStep does it is to stash retainCount in memory
just below the object by allocating extra bytes for the count and returning
a pointer just beyond those extra bytes. Now Ruamoko does the same. This
fixes the inconsistencies in structure layouts for Protocol and class
structs between qfcc generated (internal) structs and user visible structs.
F6 is fantastic, until you hit it by mistake after dieing when you meant
to hit F9 (I've done that way too often). quick.sav is still the last file
written via F6 (so F9 is unaffected), but now the previous quick.sav
becomes quick1.sav. Up to 5 (currently) backups will be kept: quick1 is
the newest, quick5 the oldest. A menu for accessing the backups has been
added as a sub-menu of the load menu.
The api hides all the gory details of message buffer setup and usage
(particularly the differences between writing and reading). Most
importantly, the api provides a safe way to read and write binary data
(always little endian).
Despair has things locked down such that running qfcc during a build fails
due to lack of read access to /usr/local/lib. This is actually a good
thing as accidentally hitting old includes/libs (when a file gets deleted
in the tree) hides bugs. Thus, --no-default-paths to turn off default
search paths.
Bill Currie
Jeff Teunissen
Sander van Dijk