| Date (yyyymmdd) | Comment |
| 20090202 |
I noticed that my first Blog entry is now almost 1 year ago! I have been programming cellular automata (virtual ants) in Javascript. I works but not fast enough for me, even though I tried serveral tricks. You learn a lot by trying different approaches on different browsers. The main problem is the number of elements in the DOM I need, a least that is what I believe. I don't mind some tricks but I prefer that the code stays elegant and straight-forward. I also searched for alternatives. The canvas tag does not work in IE natively. I try not to depend on plugins. Applets don't work in every browser eighter. Svg is very badly supported, it seems to work different on every browser. While I was searching I found a lot of interesting project. JsMSX, msx emulator written in javascript ( needs ActiveX on some browsers and support for the canvas tag). J64 and JaC64, C64 emulators using java applets. And I saw a lot of promissing svg demos, which at closer examination didn't work properly I general my quest made me appreciate FireFox a little more. I wasn't happy that my own demos didn't perform to good on FireFox. The reason for that might be that FireFox has so much other features to achieve what I am doing. The applet solution seems to work best for what I want. I even am considering using JaC64 on this site to deploy my C64 demo's I already started to experiment a little with java. It was a long time ago I did anything with java. I got my Hello world with Eclipse on Vista compiled. After changing the compiler compliance down to the jvm version on my Asus EEE, I could run it the hello.class there too. Java is not that fast eighter but I expect it will be fast enough for my virtual ants project. And it's platform independant. What I learn could be usefull in my professional work. I don't know yet If I going to make more applets or applications. In the past I tried to recompile my C-sources with different compilers. Even with very simple programs this was a problem even with a different compiler on the same OS. The problem with C-compilers is that they require some configuration, if you know what your doing and you have the necessary libraries for each compiler you should have no problem as long as you stick to standard C. Sometimes the configuration is so complex that I couldn't even get the compiler to work at all. If I remember correctly you needed Cygwin to use DJGGP. That's were they lost me. I am not good at configuring and I don't like it. I am more a programmer. It's a pity though that I never easily could recompile my more complicated C-sources under different compilers/OSes. When I did succeed to recompile, the programs behaved very differently and the executables varied considerably in size. Actually the c-compiler I used most lately ( actually a few years ago) was the cc65 cross-compiler. I even thought about using x-86 assembler for virtual ants, but I think you will end up writing for a specific OS then. |