It's been a wild week of ups and downs. At the time I posted last week's news, Puff was in a bad way. Thankfully things have improved a lot on that score, and we're going into this holiday weekend on a much more positive note.

I still have an issue with the threading test builds to fix in Linux, which I've put off all week because... Linux. But otherwise the SendMaps tests have been looking quite good. I do plan to release new test builds soon, though, once I descend back into Linux hell to deal with that console issue, and it's very likely those builds will be out sometime this weekend. In fact I'd really like to get a proper 515.1607 release out too.

Most of the week I've been working on other things, which included a detour into a project from a while back that I'd put off way too long. The goal of that one was to help a user out, but it did get me thinking along the lines of some new compiler stuff I'd love to do in 516. Actually there's been some interesting discussion on future overload operators, and also I'm thinking of creating a ~~ prefix operator for "equivalent truthiness".

But another big project on my mind has been getting ready for an improved external call API. I realized I needed to provide users more than just a header file for their linking purposes, and that turned very quickly into a minefield. I'm slowly working toward understanding what I need to do about that. The good part of that is that it looks like I won't have any issues with this on the Linux side, and that's really good news. The bad news is, the way linking against .dll files is done in Windows is very different, and I'm gonna freely admit Linux does this right and Windows does it wrong. There, I said it. If only someone had said it to Bill Gates 35 years ago.

Speaking of ridiculously rich men, I am not one, but I'm thankful for all of you who help keep things going through BYOND Membership and via various donation channels. Your support is everything. If you know friends or players or strangers who haven't hopped on board, 'tis the season for browbeating them with guilt.

Since it is the holiday weekend, I'll be officially back at it on Tuesday, but like I mentioned I'm pretty likely to shoot for some kind of release (either test threading builds or an official build or both) during the weekend. We'll see how that all goes. In the meantime this is the official start of summer, because the solstice doesn't matter, so be sure to get out there and enjoy it. And when you get back, mak gam.