[DotGNU]Portable.NET Status 22 Feb 2003

[Rhys Weatherley]

Hi all,

This week I've been mostly working on Generic IL, as already reported.  I'm 
almost at the stage where I can run generic programs (e.g. stack-generic.il), 
but it will probably be a few more days.

Generic C# is done syntactically, but I haven't done any of the semantic 
analysis or code generation logic yet.  However, cscc can be used as a syntax 
checker for generic C# code.  "cscc -fsyntax-check blah.cs" will report any 
syntax errors that it finds.

I also began work on a set of generic collection classes for C#.  Microsoft 
hasn't yet agreed upon what the generic class library will look like, so it 
is still pretty much up in the air.  The directory "pnetlib/Generics" has 
been added, which contains the generic classes that I've created so far.  
Feedback and offers of help are welcome.

It doesn't compile yet (of course), but that doesn't mean we can't get moving 
on development.  The license is X11, to (hopefully) encourage the Mono guys 
to help out, and to use this as their generic collection library once mcs 
supports generics too.  There's really no point having two different 
collection libraries.

Other stuff this week: custom marshalling for PInvoke is now implemented, 
which should allow Adam Treat and the gang to make some progress with their 
new design for Qt#.  Jonathan Springer fixed some Darwin-related issues in 
libffi and libgc (testers wanted!) and an (apparently) nasty bug in Decimal.  
Aditya P. Bansod and Gopal added some more System.IO internalcalls.

Gopal has also been working on asynchronous delegates.  Gowri Kumar 
implemented method profiling, which should hopefully be checked in soon.  And 
a few bits and pieces here and there from Adam Ballai  and Yannis BRES.

Cheers,

Rhys.