This week went a bit slow as I had some work stuff to catch up on as well as getting sick on the weekend, but I still did some stuff :)

Early in the week I spent some more time on compression stuff. It was really just some more playing with paq, where I discovered that its sparse models were pulling a ton of weight regarding the last 10kb or so, and trying to emulate those within my framework. Turns out they differ a bit too much, but I was able to tweak a ton of small things to get the same compression ratio but be around 25% faster. Of course, after doing some tests on larger executables I found my ratios tended to be a bit inconsistent and pretty slow; yet more evidence that I wasn't going to get much farther with just tweaks, so I shelved it properly for now.

This meant getting back on some visual stuff. Towards the end of the week into the weekend I did some work on the visual compiler for the tool. I set up a basic test suite and wrote tests for some basic features, basically just hardcoding some operator graphs and checking their bytecode output. Then I added global+local variable decl's, refactored everything to use a proper AST, and added error sources (minus tests for those so far). This was pretty nice for basically being thursday+friday, but then I got sick, so the rest of the weekend was spent watching anime and napping, which I can't really complain about :)

Anyways, was fairly productive, and now we're moving on the visual side of things again. Of course, the work I did was only on the compiler, and not the tooling/runtime to go with it, but I think those parts will be fairly straightforward as long as the compiler logic is ok (and the compiler's the most fun part anyways, so .. :D )