some books and kaya
In relation to a query by an client, I had to look up a bit of information about memory management. There is a very interesting page on Unix and C/C++ Runtime Memory Management (I read up to here) and Micah Altman gave an interesting presentation on the subject.
Earlier today I have to go to the library in the applied sciences faculty and there were several seemingly very cool books. One was by Bill Blunden, Virtual Machine Design and Implementation in C/C++, about the design of the HEC virtual machine. Seems intruiging, although a lot of plain code instead of text. Another book was called Computer Arithmetic, by Parhami, about the real nitty-gritty details of the algorithms and circuit designs used for processors to do arithmetic.
Last night I looked at some presentations about Ruby on Rails. It’s intruiging - about three lines of code to have a complete online form linked to a database etc. It just basically automates an enormous amount of coding between the SQL database and the webpage to maintain it. Useful for many applications, I think, but not really for online game design. It feels like giving up a little bit too much control, though, but that’s just a feeling 
.
I also spent a tiny bit more time on Kaya, trying to see how the webprog library works. It’s badly documented and the tutorial is outdated, but the source code of the library is simple enough to figure out what to do. I miss syntax highlighting in Emacs, though! The webprog part makes it quite easy to write proper webpages in Kaya code without being too much bugged down by HTML syntax, which is nice. Here’s the tiny sample program I tried:
webprog webhello;
import Webprog;
import HTMLDocument;
HTMLDocument webmain()
{
doc = HTMLDocument::new(HTML4Strict, "Test webpage");
blog = addDivision(doc.body, "My blog", "blog");
return doc;
}
Which, after very slow compiling, produces:
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8My blog
In other words, I did not have to worry about any HTML syntax, and I can determine all layout issues with CSS by simply using the
Maybe I really should consider working on an Emacs environment for Kaya and a GeSHi language file to make the above sourcecode look nice!
Add comment October 12th, 2006