I'm retiring. The reason is quite simple: It's not fun anymore. I look
at Gentoo and I see no common spirit, no trust but lots of fighting and
cabal calling. I really don't feel like putting time in something so
horribly broken anymore.

Have a nice day,

Simon

So I tinkered a bit around and ended up with something I would call a "functional brainfuck compiler". It lets you define functions and takes care of the variable<->register mappings for the whole program. An example:

main(0) {
	$0++
	$1+++
	power(0;1;2)
	asciify(2)
	$2.
}

power(3) {
	// a ^ b = c

	copy(0;2)
	copy(1;3)
	$3-[
		multiply(0;2;4)
		copy(4;2)
		$3-
	]
}

multiply(3) {
	// a * b = c
	
	clear(2)
	copy(1;3)
	$3[
		add(0;2)
		$3-
	]
}

copy(2) {
	// $0 = source
	// $1 = dest

	clear(1)
	add(0;1)
}

move(2) {
	// $0 = source
	// $1 = dest
	
	$0[-$1+$0]
}

add(2) {
	clear(2)
	$0[-$1+$2+$0]
	move(2;0)
}

clear(1) {
	$0[-]
}

asciify(1) {
	// only works for 0 >= numbers >= 9
	clear(1)
	clear(2)
	clear(3)
	$1+++++++
	copy(1;2)
	multiply(1;2;3)
	$3-
	add(3;0)
}

You can see the language is pretty close to C in some ways. The syntax is roughly:

function-specifier(argc) { code block }

A main() function is required and must have zero arguments given (should be evident ;-)). Function definitions are the only thing that is allowed in global scope, C/C++-like comments are supported. Function calls are of the form

function-specifier(arg1;arg2;argN) where arg1...argN are the numbers of the variables given as arguments. The character $ followed by a number is interpreted as a "go to the register assigned to that variable" and replaced with the necessary amount of < or > at compilation time.

So, running the code above through the compiler gives you this:

$ ./fbf bf.b
++>+++>[-]>>>[-]<<<<<[->>+>>>+<<<<<]>>>>>[-<<<<<+>>>>>]<<[-]>>[-]<<<<[->>+>>+
<<<<]>>>>[-<<<<+>>>>]<<-[>[-]>[-]>[-]<<<<[->>>+>+<<<<]>>>>[-<<<<+>>>>]<[>[-]<
<<<<<[->>>>+>>+<<<<<<]>>>>>>[-<<<<<<+>>>>>>]<-]<<<[-]>>>[-]<[-<<+>>>+<]>[-<+>
]<<-][-]>[-]>[-]<<+++++++>[-]>>[-]<<<[->+>>+<<<]>>>[-<<<+>>>]<[-]>[-]>[-]<<<[
->>+>+<<<]>>>[-<<<+>>>]<[>[-]<<<<[->>+>>+<<<<]>>>>[-<<<<+>>>>]<-]<->[-]<[-<<<
+>>>>+<]>[-<+>]<<<<.

This looks already whole dimensions more geeky. ;-) As you can see from the main() above, it calculates 2^3 and uses asciify() to then print the result.

To verify everything, i used dev-lang/bff, the fastest BF interpreter I could find:

$ bff bf.bc
8

Now, if you have a closer look at the output, you see that there is quite a lot of crap that could be just left out. For example, the first two [-]s are completely redundant. This comes from the fact that most functions clear() their local variables prior to usage to ensure that the result is correct.

So, the code could be optimized quite a bit, and I decided to write another app that cleans up the code the compiler throws out. It's still a bit buggy and doesn't work on every piece of code, but it's progressing. The really hard problem is to debug that beast, though. Currently it only drops code that is not needed, it does not rearrange nor re-write code, so the easiest method to verify that it works correctly is to replace the dropped code with blanks. The outcome happens to look rather funny:

Cool, eh?

Just for fun I've put together a snapshot of the tree from March 24 2001, the day after drobbins added 1.5 to the tree. (It's in sys-apps/portage/files/1.5, btw.). The tarball is 11M "big", featuring 1134 ebuilds and 648 packages in 51 categories. W00t!

• We have fixed nearly 1500 bugs that were either assigned to amd64@g.o or amd64-test@g.o
• Beside those, there were (of course) plenty of stablization requests that were "fixed".
• Thanks to the AT project, we managed to recruit 22 active ATs, of which 6 became devs
• We had two releases, 2005.0 and 2005.1, plus the bugfix-release 2005.1-r1, all beeing a success.
• With 2005.0, we introduced a complete new way of handling multilib, which allows to handle dependancies in a far easier way for the user. Yes, many had problems with the upgrade from 2004.x to 2005.0 as it was pretty complex, but after all, it was possible. Somewhen in the second half of the year, we finally deprecated 2004.3.
• The multilib-strict FEATURE helped us to find almost all packages that install libraries into the wrong directory. While it was really only usable for development in the beginning (I'd say every 4th package was broken), it turned into a very nice QA tool and only a few packages still fail because of multilib-strict.
• The stable tree was dramatically improved. I would say it is now possible to run a stable amd64 system without having a huge package.keywords filled up with ~amd64 entries: we're nearly as up to date as x86. The change of the keywording policy helped a lot to improve the situation: We're now notified through a bug whenever a maintainer thinks his package is stable enough to go stable.
• We got several boxes sponsored by different companies. With these boxes, we could provide accounts for other Gentoo developers that wanted to test their patches and/or new versions of their packages.
• Documentation has improved too of course: We got a FAQ and a HOWTO briefly explaining how to set up a 32bit chroot for those who still need one. Also, we put together a list of libraries covered by the emul-x86-linux-* packages. With this list we can guarantee that vulnerabilities are not only fixed in the real packages but also in the emul packages. We also wrote new documentation as part of the Unofficial Gentoo Development Guide.
• Gentoo/AMD64 became easier to install! As a consequence of this, we were able to deprecate the now no-longer needed technotes. The handbook should be enough to cover everything a user wants to know at install time, multilib has become far easier and lots of packages were fixed so that the list of popular apps that don't run natively on amd64 was cut down to 'Flash & OpenOffice'.
• Last but not least, we've improved the user<->developer communication a LOT. I can't show you any figures, this is just my personal impression :)
• But the most important of all: We had lots of fun.

Now have a look at this list and tell me that we didn't do anything exciting during the last year.