Week with project hosting sites

It is a week since I moved to other sites than Google Project Hosting — picking a service similar to it was not easy. Probably similar in principles — BerliOS and OurProject — soon proved to be designed upside down. First you have to fill lengthy form what kind of project you would like to set up, then the admins approve (or not) your project and then you finally can see the site is missing one crucial feature so you don’t want to use that site after all. Brilliant!

This left only two sites — Assembla and SourceForge (I also tried CloudForge but they don’t host files, instead they sent me spam — nice touch for a farewell). Assembla has more modern UI however it kills formatting of file description, on the other hand SourceForge does not allow any file description at all plus it supports only plain ASCII for project description. I sent bug/wish (respectively) reports right away, so far I’ve got response from Assembla (“not a bug, post a suggestion”) and no response from SourceForge. I think it is fair to say it is draw or close to that (thanks to UI I favor Assembla tad more).

All in all, it is disappointing — with Google no-upload move and the fact no site comes even close to GPH simplicity and paradoxically its rich features.

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How Google ruined my evening

I wish I could spent fruitfully my entire day, not bothering with irrelevant issues — not so many days like this in real life. Today when uploading newer NLT package to Google Project Hosting site I was notified that starting on January 15, 2014 upload of binary packages will be disabled. This translates to picking up another server, finding and updating all the links… I am thrilled. Sure, it is their server, free of charge, but it would be at least decent to give a honest reason for such call, not some pathetic excuse of abusing upload feature by some users.

I am planning gentle switch — keeping both sites in parallel, and if Google does not cancel this new policy, eventually kill Google address. The problem is which hosting site choose as a replacement? I tried Bintray (complex, no tickets), CodePlex (ticket system is a disaster), LaunchPad, GitHub and BitBucket (all three have no support for binary packages). Visually much less appealing than GPH (no MarkDown) there are SourceForge and BerliOS — most likely one of these two will be my choice.

Let’s leave the story of killing a good product aside now — this weekend, as I intended I wrote resolver for function overloading. And also:

• I added extra syntax and logic for recursive function call,
• I introduced infinitive “loop-end” — no big deal, but writing “loop” instead of “while true do” is quicker and more elegant,
• I noticed Skila didn’t have boolean operators (and, or, exor), so I added them.

I also changed the concept of the function and procedure distinction. Now, it is only a function, the only difference is that by default the result of the function has to be read.

def square(x : Int) : @ Int = x*x;

The “@” character before type indicates it is OK to drop the result. One keyword saved (proc), and now syntax is a bit more consistent with existing sink variable. This will also help in introducing light-weight interfaces.

And to keep me busy — all those changes in syntax made NLT parser fail, so I had a reason and opportunity to improve it.

OK, it is Tuesday already, so I went way overboard with “weekend work” idea — see you next week then, I am going to add strict control of execution flow and rich strings.