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Epoch Release 5 is here!

Published February 15, 2009
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OK, I'm a lying little bugger and should be viciously and repeatedly punched in the face.

I decided to go ahead and package up R5 tonight. There's really not much left that needs to be implemented - at least, nothing that's worth delaying the release.

As mentioned in my previous post, R6 will basically be just cleaned up and improved code from the VM perspective. The only really major "new" thing will be the IDE prototype app, which will ship with R6. That lets me shift gears a bit and really buckle down on the remaining fixes and improvements I want to make. Without the distraction of shiny new features to work on, I should hopefully manage to crank out R6 fairly quickly.


Release 5 is a huge deal all by itself, because it introduces so many new features and concepts. I'd really appreciate any feedback on the release - especially if you find cases where things don't work as expected. There should be plenty of sample code to get you started, and the syntax is very simple, so that shouldn't pose a huge challenge.


So, the moment you've all been waiting for: Epoch Release 5 (.RAR, 336KB)

0 likes 4 comments

Comments

Telastyn
Any chance of getting a command line interpreter/compiler rather than the menu-driven thing (or did I miss it)? It shouldn't be too hard, easier than me trying to remember/type a filename without tab completion...
February 15, 2009 09:19 PM
Mike.Popoloski
First of all, I must say I'm impressed at how fast you seem to be pushing this stuff out. Second, I'm wondering why someone would switch over to your language. I took a look at the syntax and while it's not terrible, it seems like it's just C/C++ with no operators and a few style tweaks.

If this is just meant as an academic or hobbyist project, then by all means continue onward. It's neat stuff. But if memory serves, you were meaning for this to become a language geared for real world use. If so, what does it provide that other languages do not? Why should I bother learning it?
February 15, 2009 09:42 PM
ApochPiQ
Telastyn - I seriously considered changing to a set of more standard CLI tools, but decided against it for R5 since it'd take a fair bit of work. In any case I'm converting them to CLI stuff for R6 since they'll be invoked directly by the IDE, similar to... well, every IDE on the planet [grin] So worst case, you'll have to put up with my crappy console apps until R6 [wink]


Mike - Good question [smile] Yes, I am intending to see this language gain widespread use. There are three things that need to happen first:
  • I need to write a syntactic sugar layer on top of the current "pure" syntax. This layer will allow infix operators, shortcuts for some common operations, and so on. At that point it'll look a hell of a lot like some kind of evil C++/Lisp hybrid (which is precisely what I'm gunning for).

  • There needs to be a decent set of development tools and libraries. This is a big reason why I'm jumping onto the IDE development train as soon as possible. The sooner it feels like a "professional" development toolchain, the sooner it'll be acceptable for real-world usage.

  • I need to implement the Killer Feature. In fact, this isn't just one feature, but a whole set. Basically, the goal of Epoch is to create an environment that is excellent at parallel processing - even across different types of hardware. For example, it should be possible to transparently have some Epoch code compiled into a shader, which runs on the GPU in parallel to the main CPU's tasks. This is of course very experimental, but if the plans I have are even halfway decent, Epoch should blow pretty much everything else out of the water when it comes to parallelism.



This all reminds me that I've been meaning to do a Q&A post for a while now; so along with my next status update I'll open the floor for questions [smile]
February 15, 2009 11:54 PM
Twisol
Sounds "Killer!" I'll be watching this journal closely ;)
February 16, 2009 07:13 PM
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