Lesson 7: Losing My Memory

It's hard for me to believe that I've been publishing these mostly-weekly lessons for almost a month and a half. It's been really fun. I hope that those of you reading them have been enjoying reading (and hopefully learning from) them as I have in writing them. This one covers two major topics: memory management and binary math, nothing terribly exciting, but really useful and necessary nonetheless. Learn to Program With Haiku, Lesson 7.

Lesson 6: More Loops and Conditions

Here marks the beginning of the second unit in my series, "Learning to Program With Haiku." Lesson #6 expands on our knowledge of loops and decision-making constructs. Good luck! Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 6.

Paladin Release Delays... a Good Thing??

Normally, you'd consider it a bad thing when a software release has to be pushed back. I was thinking of pushing out that release I mentioned earlier this past afternoon, but it's not going to happen.

I just kind of fell into a coding session this afternoon and this evening and it yielded some great results. I managed to get a well-known Linux tool, ccache, built for Haiku and Zeta and tweaked Paladin to take advantage of it. I did some testing on my P4 3.0 Ghz with hyperthreading (a dual processor machine to Haiku) with a copy of the sources to FtpPositive that I had lying around. The results completely blew my mind.

Build Type	Build Time
single-threaded, uncached	13 seconds
multithreaded, uncached	12 seconds
single-threaded, cached	~3.5 seconds
multithreaded, cached	~2.25 seconds

That's an 80% improvement with build caching! For small projects with only a few files, it doesn't make nearly that big of a difference, though. The bigger the project, the bigger the boost, it would seem.

I also found a few bugs that I managed to squish that were related to a feature that I implemented during the snow days I had earlier this week and discovered another one which needs to be taken care of plus some more general testing before a release can be made. When it's all done, though, this will be a really nice improvement over the last development release and a huge leap over the stable branch.

Programming Lesson 5: Arrays, Strings, and Pointers

It's that time of the week! This is the end of the first unit of lessons... about halfway to writing our first GUI program for Haiku. Some more advanced concepts, especially pointers, are found in this one. Enjoy! Learning to Program with Haiku, Lesson 5

Lesson 4: If, For, And, Not, Or

Hey, that rhymes even! Lesson 4 is now out. Decision-making and repeating instructions are on the agenda for this one, expanding the repetoire of basic skills for writing code. Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 4.

New Paladin Release Coming Soon

At least in the last week or so I found the coding motivation that I seemed to have misplaced. I did some hacking on Paladin and was amazed at how easily a couple of features came together. I *finally* managed to make drag-and-drop group reordering work correctly. This has been a feature that I've been personally missing since drag and drop was implemented in the project window. There's even a visual regular expression tester that's been added to the Tools menu.

The feature that's holding things up is the Code Library. The concept? Encourage (and in my case, simplify) code reuse by creating modules of code that, once imported into a project, remain synchronized with the master copy. It's a little like source control, but on a more basic level. It seems simple on the surface, but it's turning out to be more of a challenge than I thought. I personally plan to use it a *lot*, so I'm waiting to get it right before the next release.