2022 January Retrospective

Holy-molly, it’s the end of January. Time truly flies by these days, more so than used to be. At least that’s how it all feels to me; or perhaps I am just getting old and gray, which of course wouldn’t be surprising. Nobody can stay young forever, not even me the great code gardener of the gods.

But on a more serious note, I did promise at least one post per month and here I am fulfilling that promise. I think that doing it more of a monthly- retrospective-almost-newsletter-style might actually work and force me to sit down and write, rather than just keep postponing it indefinitely by finding various excuses.

While January was truly a very very busy month for me work wise, I didn’t get much done on my personal projects; in fact I got done even less than I hoped that I would find the time to do so.

But, I did start the work in earnest so to speak on OLEN Build and started sketching out the OLEN Games Toolchain as a whole as well. There isn’t anything that I could write in length about just yet, but I managed to get the proverbial ball rolling in the right direction. Or at least that’s what I would like to believe.

However, there’s one detail that I will share, even though it’s not going to be the most exciting thing known to man. What is it, you might ask?

Well, I decided to use OpenMP for the parallel-execution aspect of OLEN Build. How well will this turn out to be in practice, that remains to be seen, but even if it turns into an utter disaster, the project is still in a very early state so it should be easy-peasy to swap it out and do it the old fashioned manual way without relying on OpenMP.

In its crudest incarnation, one can imagine something like the code snippet below.

const char *cmds[] = {
	"cc -O2 -c test0.c -o test0.o",
	"cc -O2 -c test1.c -o test1.o",
	...
	NULL
};

...

#pragma omp parallel for shared(cmds) schedule(runtime) ordered
for(const char **cmd = cmds; *cmd != NULL; cmd++)
{
	char *output = execute_cmd(*cmd);
#pragma omp ordered
	puts(output);
	free(output);
}

...

Not too shabby, right? Of course one mustn’t forget to compile with -fopenmp, but that’s a small price to pay.

At any rate, that’s pretty much all I got to share for the time being. See you at the end of next month, which also happens to be the month when I do age++.