LLVM 2.0
The Chieftains is one of my favorite musical groups. I love celtic/irish music and dancing. Their Celtic Wedding : Music of Brittany in particular is a collection of melodies that drive all sorts of sentiments and feelings home, for me. The 6th track ("Heuliadenn Toniou Breizh-Izel") is my favorite "programming time tune" nowadays. Highly recommended.
I have been working on a storage management system for Switch ( our library of frameworks that forms the core of just about every project at work ) which is going to be an evolution to our current JFG (Journalized File Groups) component. What it will basically do, is allow for transactional, safe and optimized filesystem operations. I am using a modified MVCC system for transactions and the wonderful ARC algorithm for caching now, and a dynamic (call me heuristics based) system for self-optimization for either reads or writes depending on the pattern of the operations scheduled. It still has a long way to, partly because I am trying various schemes as I go on assessing which works best. I feel I have wasted a whole lot time on this small project but I hope it will pay off in the end. There are at least 2 major projects that will be benefited from it and I can't wait to integrate it into them.
I have a new favorite TV series. CBS's The Big Bang Theory. Speaking of TV series, I have to admit Lost is great. I more or less forced myself to watch it through the first season, just because everyone was talking about it and I wanted to see what was there and I couldn't see it. Once I got into season 2, it got really interesting, whereas on season #1 it was somewhat boring for me. Watching season 3's episodes were a class above season 2's and that says a lot. If you were like me and thought Lost was not worth it, perhaps also judging from the first few episodes, give it another try. It is way worth it.
Great news for LLVM Mark! Video seems unavailiable, try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRaLPupGks
:)
LLVM is probably one of the reasons Apple moved away from language-centric solutions earlier in this decade (e.g. Java) and kept Cocoa and Objective-C (viz. it's recent upgrade to version 2.0, bringing it closer to the state of the art) as the main language for OS X. LLVM promises a safeguard from language obsolescence, something Apple knows very well from back when Mac OS was written in Pascal and more recently with the migration of the vast majority of applications to Cocoa/Carbon.
Abstraction is proliferating at all levels, and language independence couldn't be missing from the party. The open source world knows this and has produced excellent bindings and frameworks that allow considerable flexibility, but I guess Apple's focus can only accelerate the development of a truly world-class language independent compiler suite.
Your project seems quite interesting. I guess you'd probably not be willing to disclose much more about it, given that it's used in the context of phaistos, but if you did present a more technical overview on another post that'd be great and might spark some interesting discussion.