After spending the holidays away from almost all things Ember I'm back again. I did manage to do a little Ember work since it turned out that the .package file I uploaded to Sourceforge had become corrupt: that's what you get for claiming it from the upload pool before it has finished uploading. Wasn't harder than reuploading though.There's been some really promising work done over Christmas however mainly by Alex Torkhov who have contributed greatly to the project through mainly the Launchpad. Our hope was that the Launchpad would make the project more transparent and provide a more technical forum for bug reports and suggestions, and it makes me happy to see that it's being used in that way.
Also, there's been some nice additions to the wiki by Alabandit, mainly concerning an introductory guide to Ember, something I've never had time to do.
All in all some promising new additions.
When I did the 0.5.1 release I only had time to do a precompiled version for Linux. I was hoping that someone could be able to help me with creating a precompiled win32 binary, but in the end I have to roll up my sleeves and do it myself. It's not a pretty job. But I've made a promise that I won't do any further Ember development until there's a binary version available for those using Windows.
Previously I've used MSVC for compilation, but it means I constantly have to hack the wf libs Ember just to make it compile. So instead I'm working on getting a fully working build environment set up in Windows through MSYS. It's getting there, but it slow as hell. Just running configure can take up to 10 minutes. I don't know what's making it so slow, and I have no interest in trying to hunt it down, as long as it works. But then there's all kinds of wonderful stuff, such as Windows case-insensitive naming system, as well as the inability to separate data from file system location ("This file is locked by another process." Yes, but would it be too hard to tell me which process is locking it?). And so on. It's just a tedious work.
And I have so many ideas for what I want to do next in Ember, but all of that will have to wait until I've conquered Windows.
2 comments:
I think running shell scripts with MSYS is slow because executing a new process is much more expensive on windows than it is on most UNIX like systems. The windows system model does not call for large numbers of small programs to be run quickly. The cyphesis configure script launches somewhere just under 3000 processes and I imagine the Ember script runs even more.
I also found out that the whole process went 1000% faster when running a dedicated Windows OS, instead of one hosted by VMWare. I guess that the threading model in the host OS (linux) didn't want to play nice with the one in Windows, making the creation of new processes even slower.
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