Still alive and kicking!

It’s now about four months since the last update, but we’re back now from the holidays. Not much has happened during this time, the plan is to next add text drawing support, so foundation for Font Manager was laid briefly out, and Resource Manager is being reworked to allow calls to GetResource or ROM fonts soon.

Trap generator

The biggest change at this point in the recent days has been the work on automatic trap glue code generator. So far, all trap definitions have been added manually into the C headers and the glue code written by hand for each of them, but now we’re taking the bullet and actually implementing the generator responsible for creating those files.

For this task, we did careful consideration of a bunch of ways to handle generating this glue code, and ended up with using AWK scripts combined with basic unix shell script calling those AWK scripts. As all our Toolbox trap definitions are stored in a CSV file, which we generate from the master Excel file, the nature of AWK as line-by-line text processing tool fits pretty well.

At this point, we also tweaked further the argument formats, to make them better suited to the future MixedMode calling, such as converting arguments which were accidentally added as value-types into proper pointers (such as Pattern arguments in QuickDraw, etc)