The Release 12 compiler is officially generating workable bytecode now - to the point where I can run a (very small) subset of the compiler tests in the VM.
One of these tests is the old "pi" program, which simply computes pi to a few digits of precision using a simple but naive infinite series method. I'm too tired to profile it, but it runs reasonably fast in Release builds of the VM, and compilation is lightning quick.
There's a minor feature missing in that "postfix entities" (which right now are limited to do-while loops) don't quite work right, but I'm also too tired to figure that out at the moment. A guy's gotta sleep at some point!
Hopefully soon I'll get postfix entities working correctly and maybe get some more done on reimplementing language features. Right now type inference is totally crippled and overloading is fairly broken, but that's moving along slowly but surely.
My next big project will be to start going through the compiler test programs one at a time and getting them to work again. Apparently most of them are broken even in Release 11, which is kind of embarrassing. I plan to build a large suite of compiler tests for basically every little language feature so I can isolate stuff and hopefully someday add automated regression testing to the build process. That'll have to wait until I stop developing solely on this crappy old laptop, though :-)
I'm hesitant to speculate on a release schedule for R12, mainly because it's hard to predict how much time I'll get to spend on Epoch in the coming months. But I can definitely say that it's shaping up, and once the compiler is back up to par, it's going to be a hell of a release.
Stay tuned!
