Sunday, June 16, 2013

Shed Skin 0.9.4

I have just released Shed Skin 0.9.4, a (restricted-)Python-(2.x)-to-C++ compiler. The full release notes can be found here, as usual.

Major thanks go to Ernesto Ferro, who has been making many large refactorings in the code to improve maintainability. He also found a nice new example, called Gh0stenstein (see picture below). Paul Haeberli has also triggered several very useful improvements.

Besides refactoring, most changes are minor fixes or improved tests. But there are quite a few of them. There are also 3 new examples, meaning there are now 75 examples in total, which I think is a milestone in itself.

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Shed Skin 0.9.3

I have just released version 0.9.3 of Shed Skin, a restricted-Python (2.4-2.6) to C++ compiler. This is the third maintenance release since 0.9, and as such there were (almost) no major changes.

For the full list of changes since 0.9.2, please see the release notes.

Five interesting new examples were added for this release, bringing the total to 72. Most interesting to me are Pygasus, a 1,500 line NES emulator that is able to play mario bros (Maciek "Mistrall" Żuk), as well as a pure Python implementation of timsort, the famous Python sorting algorithm (ported from java to python by Dan Stromberg).

In the meantime, the C64 emulator (see my earlier posts) has grown to about 6,000 lines of code (sloccount) but is still compiling fine (though it takes about 10 minutes here, still not that bad). I'm tempted to update the scalability graph I posted earlier.

In any case, I would like to thank the authors of the new example programs for sharing their code (maciek, dan, thomas, piotr, keegan) and those who provided improvements (danny milosavljevic) or feedback since 0.9.2.