archives/rooms/tornado/ Tornado-related posts from Squawks of the Parrot en-us Mark Pilgrim (f8dy@diveintomark.org) Copyright 2011 Mark Pilgrim 2011-02-21T21:23:32-05:00 daily 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 archives/000482.html One thing that's really useful to have, when experimenting with new things, is an existing thing that does something like what you're trying to build. I don't mean something to copy, but rather something that you can judge your performance against as you work on an alternate implementation. There are many different ways to do a task, but it's silly to spend much time working on a way that's slow and clunky. As a for example, as I dive back into working on Tornado, I dusted off the implementation of Conway's Game of Life. It's a nice piece to... ( words) Tornado 2011-02-21T21:23:32-05:00 archives/000466.html Okay, so, I'm unimaginative, but I like the game of life. It's nifty, looks cool, captures the attention of people (like, say, me) who're attracted to shiny things going "Pling!", and stresses interesting parts of a system. It was one of the first real things we did for Parrot, and for the longest time it was one of the benchmark programs. Who knows, maybe it still is, I dunno. Anyway, I've been working on a GOL for Tornado. It works too, which is cool, and it's a little surreal to do a full generation with no explicit loops in... ( words) Tornado 2006-11-16T07:12:21-05:00 archives/000462.html So, I've released Tornado 0.05. This release, in addition to a few bug fixes, now properly handles callbacks into the embedding application. The perl module's been rev'd to handle this as well. This means you can call tornado code from your perl, you can get results back from that tornado code, and you can register perl subs as callbacks for that tornado code. Nifty! There's one big limitation, which I'm unhappy with. For reasons that annoy me, when waiting on a handle for results, only callbacks posted in the function the handle represents will be processed. I'd hoped to... ( words) Tornado 2006-09-26T19:06:22-05:00 archives/000461.html I know it's an act of supreme, if likely wrongheaded, laziness, but rather than trying to figure out how to build libraries on Windows, or get libraries loading via relative paths right on OS X, I just hacked up the makefiles for the perl module and the main tornado distribution to directly reference the objects. That means you get the whole wad just linked into your perl module, and at some point I'll get library building done in a proper cross-platform way so you can have your .so / .dll / .dylib again. In the mean time, I get... ( words) Tornado 2006-08-29T19:07:59-05:00 archives/000460.html Just cut a release of Tornado 0.04 -- http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/things/tornado-0.04.tar.gz. More fixed bugs and whatnot, but the fun new thing now is that the perl module (in the perl subdirectory) builds and tests, and that includes assembling a sample program, invoking it, and getting the results back. This is, I think, a pretty cool thing. Unfortunately there's still some manual bits, like you have to copy the tornado shared library into the lib/ directory in the perl module's build directory when you're building and testing, but that's only because I've forgotten the Weird Magic needed to get MakeMaker to add... ( words) Tornado 2006-08-27T20:33:13-05:00