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                    JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 29TH JULY, 2015
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SUBJECT: Go 1.5 betas & What next for WolfMUD?
   DATE: Wed 29 Jul 18:53:31 BST 2015

I've recently been trying out the Go 1.5 beta 1 then beta 2 releases. Both
versions built from source and compiled on AMD64 and ARMv6. Only issue I came
across was an "Error running API checker" test failing but everything else
seemed fine. Still using Go 1.4.2 for daily use and development at the moment
though. I believe that Go 1.5 is scheduled for August, so any time soon :)

Are there any specific changes in Go 1.5 I'm excited about? Actually I'm more
interested in the "non" changes, which may seem weird. The Go language is
still the Go language - only a minor backwards compatible tweak has been made
to rectify an oversight in defining map literals. What I love about Go is it's
simplicity and stability.

Do I use Go for my day job? Unfortunately not. For my day job I need to use
PHP and support a mountain of legacy code that has been accumulating for over
a decade. PHP 7.0.0 Beta 2 has recently been released. Looking at the release
notes I see they are changing variable semantics, parenthesis handling,
automatic array handling, string handling, integer handling, adding two new
operators - the null coalescing operator (??) and the combined comparison, or
spaceship, operator (<=>).

At the best of times PHP is such a loose language that I'm surprised code
hangs together long enough to do something useful. Supporting code and
upgrading through all the versions of PHP4 and PHP5 was a pain. I'm guessing
PHP7 will be no different. There was no PHP6 as that was abandoned with parts
backported to PHP5.

I'm not going to get into any discussions or arguments over PHP with anyone.
Yes, there is a lot of it out there running websites. Yes, there are people
who say they love PHP. Personally I hate PHP, but it pays the bills. End of.

Back to WolfMUD. Near to tidying up the code for commands currently
implemented after changing how exits are implemented. Wondering what to tackle
next. There are two big things that need doing: Multiplayer networking and
loadable data files. While not ideal the hardcoding in setup.go allows places
and items to be created. However there is currently no substitute or work
around for the missing multiplayer networking.

I guess it's going to be networking next as soon as I finish the cleanup :)

--
Diddymus


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