Symmetry Autumn of Code

[Ecstatic Coder]

On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 08:08:03 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
> On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 06:24:04 UTC, Zheng (Vic) Luo wrote:
>
>> Moreover, The term "dependency-free" in the project 
>> description often confuses me, because as a hardware-agnostic 
>> library the project does have to depend on external 
>> implementations like "sin"/"memset" or even "thread_start", 
>> and I'm not sure which kind of dependency is proper for this 
>> project: Should we assume a multi-threading model? Should this 
>> library rely on "malloc"/"free"? Correct me if my 
>> understanding is wrong since I had few experience on embedded 
>> programming.
>
> There is more to this project than just getting a software 
> rasterizer in D.  Part of the goal is to demonstrate D as a 
> formidable alternative to C in micrcontroller firmware 
> programming.  D will never achieve that notoriety if it's 
> always depending on C, the C runtime, the C standard library, 
> or some library implemented in C.
>
> So, IMO, if you need to link in a library or object file that 
> was not compiled from D code, then you're cheating.  This is 
> also one of the reasons why I suggested re-implementing 
> software building blocks such as `memcpy`, `memset`, `malloc`, 
> `free`, etc. in D as another potential project for the Autumn 
> of Code.
>
> So, to keep this software rasterizer project within scope, I 
> suggest creating naive implementations of those functions in D 
> for now to stay true to spirit of the project (no dependencies, 
> everything in D), and "make the point".  You can those software 
> building blocks in their own module, and let the user of the 
> software rasterizer library link it their own implementation if 
> they wish to deviate from the spirit of the proposal.
>
> Mike

I agree

But this BetterC minimalistic standard library (allocations, 
arrays, strings, slices, maps) is something which can be reused 
by many similar hardware-level projects.

This is a project on its own, and as I said, I think it should 
better be provided to the candidate so he can use his development 
time on developing the rasterizer, and, if there is enough time, 
a minimalistic nuklear-like gui system over it to demonstrate its 
performance and usefulness.