The Blog

New people contributing to Nemerle project

Lately the interest in Nemerle is increasing. Not only in using the language (and reporting bugs), but also in development of compiler and tools.

Ricardo Fernández Pascual had contributed a nice work on multidimensional arrays and some other patches, now he is working on implementing Polyphonic C#'s features for asynchronous concurrency abstractions (I've seen some preliminary code and I was impressed by the usage of all this macro stuff I developed).

Just a few days ago Atsushi Eno contributed a CodeDom provider for Nemerle - it revealed some bugs in the compiler and crashed on lack of a few features. Now it is in one SVN repository and it will be rewritten in Nemerle itself.

In the present time, during summer vacations the development from core team was a little bit slowed down, now finally I've put some chunks of code to the repository.

Signing assemblies with assembly attributes

Compiler is now able to understand and compile

This allows giving version, title, keypair, etc. to compiled assemblies. Well, actually saving this metadata required some additional work (they are not loaded from saved assembly attributes, but there is a special API for this in System.Reflection).

Nemerle + GAC

After signing our assemblies with strong key pairs, it is possible now to put them into the GAC. Bootstrapping compiler with these keys was a little painful, but probably mostly because of my mistake... I have put one of the stages' assembly into the gac and forgotten about it... So in the middle of bootstrapping, everything crashed with a message that assembly cannot be found. It took me some time before I realized that runtime is loading assembly from the gac, not from the proper directory.

Finally I have successfully fixed all the problems, fixed command line option for referencing assembly by its strong name and then it was done - we can place and use Nemerle libraries into Mono and .Net Framework GACs!