(As if you needed it), a quick reminder that Sophie Wilson (the co-designer of the BBC Micro and original designer of the ARM chip), will be giving a talk for Rougol on monday night about the Future or Microprocessors with a Q & A afterwards and lots of BBC/ RISC OS trivia.
 
The talk starts at 7:45pm and is free. You just need to ask ROUGOL for an invite...
 
Rougol website
 

This time round, we talk to Chris Johnson, long time software developer of his own applications and more recently recently fo several 'orphan programs' from others.
 

There is another update for the Iris browser (now version 1.010).
 

Some things we noticed this month. What did you see?
 

Another program to be 'adopted' by RISC OS Developments in 2020 was LanMan98. This works with LanManFS. It provides faster access to Windows network shares and also better naming and mapping options. I wrote this article on 2.06 and RISC OS Developments have just released v2.08
 

Iris continues to evolve and RISC OS Developments announced v1.008 in their latest newsletter.
 

If you keep an eye on the RISC OS bounties, you will have noticed one for Git. The bounty is now underway and more details are here. In this article we explain all you need to know about Git.
 

Tonight's online talk was by Daryl Dudley, with a starting audience of 45 people.
 
Daryl started off by introducing himself. In real life he is a principal sales engineer, using lots of programming languages. Started with a Master 128 back in the 1980s. A keen Pi user. Long term forum lurker....
 
DARIC is a modern BASIC inspired by BBC BASIC and BlitzBasic. It uses a VM with no real memory limits. Ultimate goal is native compilation.
 
In 2017 inspired to recreate Zarch. BBC BASIC was too slow and not an assembly language fan. So started a C based module with a 3D graphics library. This was shown at London Show 2019.
 
This was still tricky to debug and slow to compile. Also wanted to port code to Master 128 with PiTube. Lots of input and inspiration from Rob Coleman. PiBasic was born. Realised it was getting good performance and in some cases faster than BBC BASIC V as statically types and compiled to byte code. Removed BBC BASIC compatibility requirement and wrote version 2. Now at version 6. Developed on Visual Studio and targeted at RISC OS. HAs moved away from BBC BASIC syntax.
 
Ported lots of Java and Blitz projects.
 
The goals of Daric are to be:-
1. Fun
2. Clean syntax.
3. Cross-platform
4. Interactive mode.
5. "Batteries included"
6. Near Instant run
7. Integrated 2D/3D graphics
8. Hardware acceleration where possible.
9. Sprite model.
10. Entity model
11. Tile Maps
12. Sound support with synthesis, samples and music.
 
The architecture of Daric is:-
1. Antlr4 based parser.
2. 3 pass Compiler.
3. Runtime with stack based VM and a debugger.
 
Based on C++11 and cross-platform.
 
Daryl next showed us to demos of Daric code running on his Pi and some sample source code.Language has built-in debugging on F10 key. Does not do textures yet.
 
The talk ended as usual with the chance to ask lots of questions
 
Next month on 19th April the speaker will be Sophie Wilson.
 
More details of talks are on the ROUGOL site