Beginning Work on NXC Memory Manager

If you haven’t heard already, I’ve begun work on a “Memory Manager”.

What it does

Using my library (libraries, actually), you’ll be able to:
[Please insert "pseudo-" in front of all the list items.]

• Create variables (bools, [unsigned] chars, [unsigned] ints, [unsigned] longs, floats, doubles, strings, and arrays of those types, too)
• Set their values (working on it; support for different ops is being added)
• Pointers! (And pointers to pointers, or pointers to pointers to pointers, or pointers to pointers to pointers to pointers, or…)
• Use “hash tables” (working on it)
• Parsers of [obfuscated] expressions (… guess; yeah, you’re right: I need to finish the hash stuff first)
• “Dynamic” memory management
• Dynamic typing (if you’re insane enough to want this), and duck typing (I just wrote this down for kicks, actually; quack quack)
• Function overloading
• Possibly operator overloading
• And definitely use super advanced kung-fu fighting robot functions

Example code

By “pseudo”, I mean you won’t be able to do this:

int lol = 42;
int *pi = lol;
NumOut(0, 0, *pi, 0);

But we will have something similar to this:

MM_ID lol = MM_new(MM_ID_TYPE_INT);
// prototype: MM_ID MM_new(MM_ID_TYPE type = MM_ID_TYPE_BYTE, unsigned long len = 1);

MM_mov_INT(lol, 42);
// or use MM_set_INT(lol, 42);

MM_ID pi = lol;

NumOut(0, 0, MM_get_INT(pi), 0);

It’d look a lot nicer if NXC itself supported function overloading. >_> Assuming it did, here’s the new version:

MM_ID lol = MM_new(MM_ID_TYPE_INT);
MM_mov(lol, 42);
MM_ID pi = lol;
NumOut(0, 0, MM_get(pi), 0);

No more _INTs!

Or, if you take my “parser” into account, something similar to this:

P_parse("int lol = 42;");
string pi = "lol";
NumOut(0, 0, P_get_INT(pi), 0);

How to contribute

If you’re willing to help, you can become a tester. I don’t have a NXT with me all the time, so I post things for people to test at the Memory Manager thread on the Mindboards Forums.

Also, I’ve set up a Mercurial repository, if you want to check out my progress.

About these ads

~ by muntoo on March 18, 2011.