Re: [DotGNU]Finalizing the Meet-a-thon stuff

[Peter Minten]

Hi,

Gopal V wrote:
> 
> Hey Everyone,
>     Let's finish the "Status Of DotGNU Union" , "Status of Projects"
> and all the other docs we promised to write when we planned the meet-a-thon.
> I would like them collected and compiled into a nice little doc sooner
> or later ..

First of all 'Status Of DotGNU Union' = 'Status of Projects' :-). The
WIW I've been working on is attached to this message, it's becoming more
and more complete (though entries are still welcome :-). I've currently
received one project status, it's the pnet status and it's attached to
this message.

>     Finalize when & where the meeting is to be held ... where the logs
> are kept .. who posts the summaries per session and assign "reporters"
> to sessions .. Also we need to figure a way to provide interaction after
> the meet-a-thon , via anchor persons for each subject/topic ..

About where: do we keep a newbie discussion constantly open on
#dotgnu-newbie and let the #dotgnu channel switch to more advanced stuff
after the first sessions?

Greetings,

Peter

Name: Brandon Bremen
Nickname: Absurdhero
Email: address@hidden
Jabber: address@hidden
Description: OSX java developer. Donates his Mac for dotgnu testing

Name: Stephen Compall
Nickname: S11001001, sirian
Email: address@hidden
Function: pnetlib hacker, creator of the `network' interpretation of SEE
Skills: C,C++,Python,C#,Java,Lex,XML*,Texinfo
Timezone: -0600 (C[SD]T)

Name: James Michael DuPont
Nickname: mike, mdupont
Email: address@hidden
Function: quality assurance on cscc, introspector project founder
Skills: C,C++,Perl,SQL,XML, learning C#
Timezone: +0100 UTC (CET)

Name: Barry Fitzgerald
Nickname: fitzix
Email: address@hidden
Function: Steering Committee member and DotGNU project co-founder
Advanced Skills: HTML, XML, Shell Scripting, JavaScript, Pascal
Median Skills: C, C++, Java
Skills Learning: C#, Python, Perl

Name: Peter Minten
Nickname: Silvernerd
Email: address@hidden
Function: Lead Developer in pnetlib, Project Leader in Forum
Skills: C,C++,C#
Timezone: +0100 UTC (CET)

Name: Chris Smith
Nickname:
Function: A Lead Developer for VRS, Project Leader/Developer of the Goldwater 
Middleware (used by the VRS).

Name: Adam Theo (aka Johnny Jabberseed (thanks stpeter!))
Nickname: theo
Email: address@hidden
Jabber: address@hidden
Function: Jabber Advocate/Representative

Name: Gopal V
Nickname: t3rmin4t0r
Email: address@hidden
Function: Lead Developer At Large in pnetlib, hacker and debugger in pnet, 
Jack-of-all-trades in DotGNU, manages pnetlib-status pnetlib-doc webpages
Skills: C,C#,Java,Python,Php, Java, Shell Scripting
Timezone: +0530 UTC

Name: Rhys Weatherley
Nickname: rhysw
Email: address@hidden
Function: Primary Portable.NET Maintainer
Skills: C,C++,C#,i386 assembly,autoconf/automake,bourne shell
Timezone: +1000 UTC (AEST)

During the last three months, Portable.NET has continued to stablise
and improve in performance and portability.  Special thanks go out
to the many contributors who joined during the last DotGNU Meet-a-thon.

Runtime Engine
--------------

The Converted Virtual Machine (CVM) interpreter core has seen some
massive improvements in performance lately (a 4-fold improvement in
the month of May alone).

We are also steadily decreasing the number of "TODO" items in the
IL instruction set and the InternalCall methods.  We should reach
ECMA-compatibility at the engine level sometime in the next few
months.

Most of the core ECMA functionality is present.  Some work remains
in the areas of debugging, file/socket operations, and threading.

C# Compiler
-----------

The C# compiler is steadily improving.  It can compile about 80%
of the C# language.

We can compile pnetlib in "metadata only" mode, which only processes
the outer levels of class definitions.  Some pnetlib components can
be fully compiled, but there are still code generation bugs.

User applications fair a bit better.  The C# compiler can successfully
build common C# application code.

Finalizing the C# compiler is the next big task for Rhys once the
engine is completed.

C# Library
----------

The most significant changes to date have been to pnetlib.  In the
last three months, most of the System and System.Xml assemblies have
been written, with contributions from Peter Minten, Stephen Compall,
Gopal V, Charlie Carnow, and others too numerous to mention.  See
the ChangeLog and NEWS files for a complete list of contributions.

The pnetlib library remains the easiest place to start if you wish
to contribute code to Portable.NET.  Check out the pnetlib status
page to see what still remains to be done.

A new internationalization (I18N) framework was added to pnetlib,
which we will be sharing with the Mono project.

The DotGNU Steering Committee made a decision to use pnetlib for the
low-level C# class libraries, and to use Mono's upper-level C# class
libraries for everything else.  This reduces the amount of work that
we need to do to reach feature-complete on Portable.NET, and reduces
code duplication between the projects.

Other Things
------------

The assembler, disassembler, and documentation tools were mostly
complete at the last DotGNU Meet-a-thon.  Various bugs have been
fixed, gradually stablising the toolchain.

The ildb debugger is still in its early days, but should be usable
sometime in the next couple of months now that the runtime engine
is nearing completion.

We also improved portability of the code quite considerably.  We
now know that it builds and runs on GNU/Linux, Cygwin, Solaris
(32-bit and 64-bit), FreeBSD, NetBSD, and MacOSX.  It limps along
on HPUX, and will probably run on many other platforms.  We are
always looking for porting assistance.

Recently, a "profile" system was added to the code which allows the
runtime engine and pnetlib to be built in smaller configurations.
Eventually, we hope to support embedded systems running stripped-down
versions of Portable.NET.