Eero

Eero is undergoing some design changes during the (extended) beta period and port to LLVM 3.x. Some of them are a result of recent changes to Objective-C, while others are intended to address readability or consistency concerns. Namespace-like ... [More] prefixes will employ a new syntax and affect more symbols. Instead of the modified typedef notation, Eero [...] [Less]

The changes announced by Apple yesterday to Mac developers will be welcome additions to Eero as well. NSArray and NSDictionary literals will be especially nice in Eero, as the ‘@’ prefixes won’t be needed†: Array list = ['first', 'second', 'third'] Dictionary dict = { 'first' : obj1, 'second' : obj2, 'third' : obj3 } As [...]

A preliminary (very rough) Objective-C interpreter based on llvm/clang’s JIT is now available in the eerolanguage GitHub repository. This could eventually provide a nice scripting and prototyping tool for Eero and Objective-C.

The move to LLVM/clang 3.0 is finally underway. You can see the progress in the in-work repo, although patches won’t be provided until all the features are in. Some seriously-needed cleanup and refactoring is also getting done in the process. As has been done before, the frozen release (now tag RELEASE_30) will be used. However, [...]

As is probably obvious, very little work has been done on Eero itself over the last few months. This is about to change, as other pressing commitments are finally settling down. Updating to LLVM 3.0 will of course be a top priority. The iPhone app in progress has run into non-Eero (and really non-technical) issues, [...]

The end of the beta period has been delayed. The pre-release milestone is now estimated for the beginning of next year, with the 1.0 release a couple months after that. Apologies to those planning to use Eero for any “real” work, but other (paying, family, and other pressing) commitments have unfortunately put pressure on Eero’s [...]

The beta release also contains some new features for strict enumerated types. Type attributes User-defined strict enum types now have property-like, compile-time attributes that can be accessed using dot notation on the type name. The attributes are ... [More] first, last, and length. first and last return the type-safe first and last members, respectively, while length returns [...] [Less]

The NSRange structure is an important data type in Foundation. Eero provides a few range convenience features. They have been available since the beta milestone was reached. Range construction An expression of the form † first .. last creates an instance of an NSRange structure, whose first value is NSUInteger first and last value is [...]

As of the first beta release (last week), Eero supports a construction that looks like a nested function, but is semantically a (const) block. These can appear in methods, functions, or blocks, and the normal block closure rules apply. They can also be defined within if, else, while, for, etc. indented statements. implementation MyClass ... [...]

I’ve now done some basic testing on Linux — specifically Debian Squeeze x86_64. LLVM/clang 2.9 with the Eero patches applied built without any problems. The first bit of Eero test code I tried had no objc calls, and compiled, linked, and ran fine. People are encountering LLVM/clang (non-Eero) issues on some Linux distros (including Ubuntu [...]