DISCLAIMER: These notes are from the defunct k8 project which precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26! The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it.
I decided to start writing a programming blog of sorts to put down random ideas for future reference and possibly some historical research. My current plan is to rework the sort of existing (since I deleted some of it) class loading code into a nice fancy new class loading code which is smaller and more modular, with tons of less boilerplate. I realized that I was mostly writing up ugly boilerplate code so this should reduce that. Although I spent the past two months pretty much writing all of this up, it should hopefully take less time than that now.
Not only do I want to reduce code, but I want to make it much more leaner and future proof. Since I am the only one working on this, I would rather not waste much time and let my code do the stuff for me. Also the loading of classes should be a bit more verbose in terms of errors rather than what I currently have. So rather than say "Invalid magic number" when loading a class, it should say "Expected 0xCAFEBABE but got 0xBLEEBLEE instead." that way when loading some random class files from somewhere you can actually determine who is at fault, and if I am it can be fixed with a nice exception like that rather than guessing.
Some of the currently existing echelong code just need refactoring along with the class dumper which could be much better, and I decided to also make it so the class dumper could output in other formats like JSON or XML. Also, if the new output format on the console gets ugly, another output can be made and switched to instead of a whole new rewrite. Being modular counts.
The sun has set, so I should get to sleeping now.