Inventor IDE Alpha 5b Released, but…
So technically Inventor IDE Alpha 5b is now released on codecortex.com; the problem is that nobody can access codecortex.com right now, even though the bill got paid in time thanks to my father. Well, I’ll just hope that it gets resolved soon and say a bit about this release.
This release finally lets users create 64-bit applications and operating system images by selecting them in the new project options dialog:
Project Options Dialog Box
There are also many user interface improvements that probably nobody else will notice, but that will come in handy in the next videos of the tutorial I’ll be continuing again soon. One that people may notice is one that I’d wanted to avoid, but there is now a progress bar for loading. Personally, I wanted the loading performance to be improved to the point there that wasn’t needed, but that’ll have to wait for the Beta version.
There are some encoding bugs fixed, mostly for the support for 64-bit code, inline functions, and not-yet-released performance test functions. As an example it turns out that general registers r12 and r13 need some undocumented encodings that I hadn’t supported until today.
The next things potentially on the agenda for Alpha 6 releases are:
- Find/replace bar, a twist on the classic find bar
- Find all references
- Unit/performance testing system
- Exports & relocations, to really support making libraries
- Listing files (a request from Prof. Reichstein for COMP 2003, and something that’d help debugging operating system code)
- Navigation side strip, for quick navigation within a file, especially for errors
- Output formats: OBJ, LIB, ELF, and Mach-O, to support Windows, Linux, and Mac with the same source code
- Input OBJs or LIBs
Things higher up are currently more likely to come sooner, but if people have any requests, please let me know. The most likely is that only a few will get implemented for Alpha 6, and the rest will be put off for when Inventor IDE has been ported to C/C++.
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