Jacek's status report - #4 of 16

[Jacek Wielemborek <wielemborekj1 () gmail com>]

Hi guys,

(this is a report 4/16 for the Google Summer of Code project „Bringing
Lua to Ncat”)

This week I was mainly polishing the --lua-exec functionality and
looking for new ways to add Lua to Ncat. The ncat-lua-inlines
experiment failed because of the complexity of the approach I took -
it turned out that it doesn't make sense to add hooks in every single
spot where Ncat tries to read or write something. I asked David for
opinion on this problem and he told me that we need a new design, but
in order to come up with it, we first need more well-defined use
cases. I kept polishing the code until Friday, when I finally
understood what David might have meant by that and came up with some
ideas of my own...

Achievements:

* Had a meeting with David. I'm mentioning this because although we
meet every week, this time the meeting took an hour and a half, during
which David assigned me almost a dozen of tasks, effectively preparing
me enough work for almost whole week.

* As a major part of the TO-DO task list David gave me, I did a lot of
work towards the preparation of --lua-exec for merging. I, with a
great deal of David's help (I truly admire his perfectionism), fixed
quite a lot of both minor and significant errors in the code and wrote
a testing program for escape_quotes function I coded up last week. I
also did a lot of experimenting in order to find a way to build these
tests under Windows and came up with two alternate solutions to that
problem. Eventually, David came up with a third one that outshined
mine ones ;)

* Graduated with the best grade possible. I now officially have a
second bachelor's degree, this time for Computer Science. I'm planning
to take the exams for the third degree on September (I still have to
complete my thesis first). Now it's just a matter of visiting my
university for the tiny bit of paperwork, but it won't take long.

* Came up with a few Ncat-Lua testcases and implementation ideas. I
already did quite some work playing with the IRC and Websockets
example, which can be seen in my ncat-lua-script branch.

Priorities:

* Explore the idea from ncat-lua-script branch - IMHO adding io.select
and io.ncatin is a real breakthrough that allows to write far more
sophisticated scripts easily. It needs a bit of bugfixing before it
gets stable though - I experienced problems while working with binary
protocols, for example while trying to port the dotelnet functionality
to Lua.

* Finally merge the ncat-lua branch.

Yours,
Jacek Wielemborek
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