Cross-post from Omnimaga:

I've finished the compiling to applications feature and I need a few people to help me do some more extensive testing. When I release the next version, which I think will be tomorrow night, application compiling will not be included, but I will also have an identical version with app compiling that I will give to a selected few.

Conditions:

• I've already tested this on an emulator, so I need this tested on real hardware (especially non-83+SEs).
  
• I need persons who will use this feature regularly.
  
• You should not have anything important in ram OR rom! Its very possible to corrupt rom if my routine is buggy. You may have to do a full rom clear to restore your calculator back to normal or even resend the OS so backups are mandatory!
  
• You should not share this version of Axe with anyone because I don't want to be liable for any of the possibilities above.
  

Although it might sounds dangerous, it should be physically impossible to brick your calculator becasue I'm only using one routine to write to flash and it explicitly checks to make sure it does not accidentally write to the certificate page, which means the worst case scenario be that you have to resend the OS. I haven't had any problems at all with the feature so far and have never needed to do any of that, so its unlikely I made any critical mistakes, but that's what I need to confirm before I make this feature public.

So any volunteers?

Well done, Quigibo. I'll definitely give this new version a try, and I'm glad to hear you have safeguards in place to prevent accidental complete terribletude. Out of curiosity, where do you construct the application temporarily before storing it to flash? I presume that the spare RAM page(s) are not an option since you have TI-83+ compatibility in there? I can't say that I would use this option regularly, since I don't (yet?) use Axe regularly, but I'll certainly give it a try for you after work today.

Yeah, a temporary copy is made in RAM first. Since there's around 24kb of user ram, its fine. You can have all your programs archived before compiling including your source code so its not a problem to do this.

This would require user cooperation though, right? You warn them and abort the process instead of automatically archiving RAM data if there's not enough space, right?

Well, I made a little appp that basicly is


For(A,1,1000
Disp " - "
End

Ram cleared

Are you sure that that's correct Axe syntax? I don't program it myself, so I don't know for sure.

Yep, it worked perfect in program mode.

in app mode.... not pretty


EDIT: It just might be the for( loops that are causing because when I tested some apps I created, most of the chrashes were from long for loops

I wouldn't exactly call that a long For( loop, though. Let's just wait for quigibo to return; I'm sure he'll know what to do.

Try doing "-"->Str1 and then Disp Str1 instead.

Displaying temporary strings works differently that displaying a pointer, so I think I forgot to update the display routine to use the app string display instead of the program string display since they are very different routines. The way the temporary strings work is that the strings are created inline and then jumped over instead of putting the string with the rest of the data which is an inefficiency. I've already started optimizing this in 0.4.0 so they behave just like regular pointers so it will for sure be fixed next version.

Hmm, interesting, so the app rroutine for strings is what caused it?

Well, more like the lack of the app routine, yes.