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Porting JX

The good news, in case you hadn’t noticed, is that our software now runs on both Mac OS and Cygwin — at least, out latest beta does.

Porting our software to Windows 2K/XP has been stalled for a few months now, but the good news is that I recently made a bit more progress by eliminating most of the uses of JInPipeStream. This particular class was originally a good idea, but since it is based on a GNU extension to the C++ stream library which never caught on, it now has to go. I’m replacing it with functions in jStreamUtil.h that operate directly on a file descriptor. Of course, this means that we lose the convenience of the stream in operator (>>), but that seems to be a small price to pay for cross-platform compatibility.

The same fate awaits JOutPipeStream.

On a similar note, since strstream is deprecated, almost all references to it have been replaced with stringstream, and jStrStreamUtil.h is now gone. Personally, I dislike the descision to deprecate strstream, because stringstream always makes copies of the data, and this is a disaster in certain cases where efficiency is critical — though I suppose some would claim that the entire C++ stream library should be avoided when efficiency matters!

If anybody has any good news about stringstream colluding with string to avoid copying data, please let me know!

Add comment November 29th, 2005

Progress on Code Crusader

Ever since I started using CVS, I’ve been kicking myself for several old design choices:

• Putting too much junk in the .jcc file
• Not tracking whether or not the .jcc file really needs to be saved
• Not making the .jcc file line based so I can get something useful out of CVS diff

Over Thanksgiving, I finally got around to cleaning this up. The .jcc file is now line based, and all the local settings, like window positions, have now been moved to a new .jup file. This clears the way for tracking whether or not the .jcc file needs to be saved — my next weekend project — which in turn will tell me whether or not I really need to check it out from CVS. (I always configure CVS so I only get write permission after I run cvs edit. This makes it easy to find the files that I have changed, especially since Code Crusader now displays the write permission in the project window! )

*.jup can now be added to .cvsignore, just like *.jst. They are both tied to the specific machine on which the code is stored.

Add comment November 29th, 2005