ASX playlists

If you tried watching Nasa TV in my last post with Silverlight, you'd find that it wouldn't work. And once again the problem is with the ASX file - to be more specific, the exact same problem I had to find a quick fix for last week for Moonlight.

The ASX file I linked to links to another ASX file. This second ASX file has a copyright symbol in it (©), and it stores it in the CP1252 code page (i.e. the binary value 0xA9 - this is an illegal value in utf8). Now it seems like Silverlight expects the file to be in utf8 [1], and it errors out if it isn't [2].

Unfortunately I can't link to the real mms link, Yahoo seems to uses some sort of authentication ensuring that you got the link from the ASX playlist.

I notified Yahoo using their contact form about this, asking them to fix their ASX output, now let's see what happens...

[1] When there are no byte-order markers at least
[2] Windows Media Player plays the ASX file just fine.

Nasa TV

Interested by the NASA's crash landing on the moon, I wanted to watch the event live on my Linux machine. NASA has a few live TV channels, but none seemed to work on Linux. Until I discovered that they use ASX files to view the channels in Windows Media Player - turns out Silverlight (and by consequence Moonlight) also support ASX files. It was just a matter of creating a simple silverlight application referencing the ASX links. And that's what I did!

The bad thing is that our ASX support was a bit broken [1], and I had to fix it. This means that the currently released beta is not able to view the streams, you need to download brand new xpis from here: x86 / x64 (fair warning: these xpis are not tested at all, download at your own risk). Download, restart firefox and you should be able to watch the event live here.

(video is scaled 200%, quality is kinda bad, but that's how it's transmitted from NASA)

[1] IMHO ASX files are broken by themselves - they look like xml files but aren't (they don't escape special characters that xml files have to), and they're encoded in the current encoding of the machine generating the ASX file, and in order to correctly parse the file you have to know which encoding that is (the file itself doesn't know).

Git & make

One of the most annoying issues with git (which is actually a side-product of the fact that it's very easy to create/administer branches), is that switching branches will cause a lot of recompiles.

ccache helps some, but the real life-saver here is a script which doesn't come bundled with your installed git, but which you'll have to download the source code to get: git-new-workdir. It clones your repository to a different directory, with some symlink magic so that everything is shared except the index. It's the git equivalent a checkout of a svn repository to different directories, except that anything you do in any of the directories is available in all directories.

Git & Whitespace

Recently I've been slowly transitioning from svn to git, though one of the mildly annoying differences is that git likes to colorize trailing whitespace in diffs with a very distracting color:



First try at fixing it: a tiny script to fix the file before committing.

Oops, that introduced a huge number of changes and would mess up history quite a bit, not the way to go.

So I added this to my ~/.gitconfig:

[core]
 whitespace = -trailing-space

and now I can see the important changes in the diffs again.

Cecil Reloaded

For our hack week here at Novell I continued hacking on making vbnc work with Cecil, and yesterday I reached the point where vbnc is able to compile itself using only Cecil (in my previous post I also said vbnc was able to bootstrap, but back then vbnc was still using SRE to do all the hard work, and Cecil just to write the final assembly to disk).

The initial performance problems are mostly gone, it's still not quite as fast as before, but there are also quite a few low-hanging fruit yet in that area. The first successful bootstrap yesterday took 40 seconds (compared to 12 seconds for the normal vbnc), and after a few optimizations I'm now down at 24 seconds. Almost all of that time was gained by allocating less strings, the first non-optimized version allocated ~1.4 GB of strings, and it's now down to 119 MB.

I'm also using a delay-loading mechanism to load data from referenced assemblies on-demand, this is not that visible when you compile a lot of code in one go, but it sure make a difference when compiling thousands of 15-20 line tests one by one.

I'm pretty confident I can get compilation time down to the 12 seconds I had before, especially given that Cecil hasn't been much optimized [1] (not actually used by compilers) before, while Mono's SRE implementation is known to be quite fast.

As a sidenote the actual amount of code in the compiler has decreased, from ~75k lines with the normal vbnc to ~68k for the cecil version.

[1] Sébastien Pouliot corrected me, cecil is used by some know compilers, and probably some unknown too. Some parts of Cecil has also been optimized already.

Cecil

When I started writing vbnc, there weren't many options when it came to deciding which library to use to write the assemblies, only System.Reflection.Emit (SRE) was a real option.

SRE is very powerful, but unfortunately it has a few known and unknown limitations, mostly because it was never designed to be used by a full-fledged compiler.

Since I heard about Cecil, I've wanted to switch, and for the last months I've slowly added support for emitting assemblies with Cecil. Yesterday I reached a very important milestone: vbnc is able to bootstrap itself when using Cecil!

And I have to say that Cecil is A LOT easier to use than SRE, especially with generics.

There are still some problems for switching right away to only using Cecil, one of the biggest being that it's quite slow if you have many referenced assemblies (since Cecil loads everything from an assembly when loading it), though there is work in progress here.

Hopefully these issues will be solved shortly, and I can finally remove everything SRE-related, which has caused me quite a few head-aches!

VB 10

Paul Vick asks what people want for VB 10.

Here's my list:

1) Inline and multiline comments (why not just copy C's /* */?)

2) Option Overflow On/Off

3) Option Warning 30XXX On/Off/Error

3) The ability to apply Options to methods and/or blocks of code. Something like this maybe:


Block Option Strict Off, Option Overflow On
    'Some code here
End Block


I don't particularily like this syntax though, it's somewhat verbose.
Another idea might be to add it to the attribute syntax:


<Option Strict Off> _
Sub A
    <Option Overflow On> _
    Using x
    End Using
End Sub>


4) Select on types, like this:


Select TypeOf obj
    Case Integer
    Case Double
End Select


6) Select on reference equality


Select var Is
    Case objA
    Case objB
End Select


The proposed syntax here doesn't work:


Select obj   
    Case Is varA   
    Case Is varB
End Select


since this is already correct VB code. You can actually write this:


Select number   
    Case Is 1   
    Case Is 2
End Select


where the 'Is' works like a '='. The IDE will remove the 'Is', but it's still allowed. This is bad design IMHO, VB should never have allowed this since it's mixing the meaning of 'Is' and '='.

7) Binary numbers


Dim i As Integer = &B0110110


8) Static method / operator constraints on generic type parameters


Class Point (Of T {+, -})
End Class


Yeah, I know, this is a IL restriction, not a VB restriction, but still...

9) Option Warning 4XXXX On/Off/Error

10) The possibility to specify that sections of code should not be pretty formatted.


#Format None
Dim var As String ()() = new String () { _
            {"a",           "bbbbbb"}, _
            {"cccccccc", "ddd"}}
#End Format


Once in a while it is nice to be able to format the code just as you want yourself, especially when you can detect bugs due to things not being symmetric or lined up.

11) Do NOT allow the user to change pretty formatting (other than disabling it). It's worth it if it avoids the mess in the C world of what's correct formatting or not (how many spaces are there in a tab? 4, 8, 2, 128? where do we put the semi-colon? where do we put spaces?). And mixed formatting in source code is just plain ugly.