The Unicon Project / Blog: Recent posts

Unicon's svn to git Guide

This is a simple guide written to help Unicon users and developers who are not familiar with git. The goal is to ease the transition from svn to git. svn is a great revision control system, but git is more flexible when it comes to managing multiple branches and repository mirrors allowing more feature experimenting and code sharing.

Git is a distributed revision control system. Once you get a copy of the code (through cloning) all of the commits, checkouts, and branches are local to the repo on your machine. When you do an initial git clone from a remote server you get everything from the server, a complete copy of the code and the revision history. The repo at the server side is no better than the repo you just cloned.... read more

Here were three things Unicon Project was was working on in Summer 2019:

1. OpenGL port. A soon-to-go-public MS thesis worked on writing Unicon's 2D facilities in OpenGL. The initial motivation was to improve portability. For example, OpenGL runs on various platforms that X11 does not, such as Android devices. An OpenGL 2D implementation might also facilitate better integration of 2D and 3D facilities, for example games with translucent 2D heads-up displays rendered on a larger 3D scene. The OpenGL 2D port looks close to finished, it mainly requires performance tuning and documentation. We were sorely disappointed to hear that Apple is dropping their OpenGL support, as we were hoping OpenGL would provide a long-term solution on that platform that didn't require installing a third-party X11 server as it has since Apple dropped support for X11. Hopefully you can see at attached picture showing three screenshots taken on Fedora 30. One is Icon and Unicon's standard 2D graphics test, gpxtest; the other two are showing the status of the OpenGL 2D port. Can you tell which one is native X11?... read more

Clint has been teaching Program Monitoring and Visualization this semester, which has been a good excuse to dust off Unicon's execution monitoring and 3D graphics facilities. Things have gone well, although the 3D facilities have proven to work better on Linux/X11 than on Windows at present. Students wrote some string parsing code for their homeworks, and used a relatively smooth combination of string scanning, pattern matching and regular expressions, showing those facilities to be in useful shape. What does it look like when the Unicon source code distribution gets rendered as a city? From the street, so far it looks like this:... read more

Unicon citizens Clint Jeffery and Jafar Al Gharaibeh met in Minneapolis around the beginning of March, 2019. The meeting worked on:

• Windows Unicon
  Code restructuring was performed to reduce the compilation effort needed to produce the two sets of binaries that come with Windows Unicon (one for console applications and one for GUI applications).
• Linux Unicon
  At least two patchable pieces of information are needed when installing Unicon binaries: the location of iconx, and the location of the libraries (under which ipl/ and uni/ are to be found). The classic Icon utility patchstr was extended to support an arbitrary number of patchable strings. Patchable strings were added to icont/ and iconx/ to allow an installer to inform the binaries where to find binaries and libraries.