The end is here, got the email from Eric Wilhelm saying that the coding time was over and that it's time to write up our final reports and final evaluations. Unfortunately, as I've already warned some people, my final report is going to be relatively lackluster.
In short, my project isn't "done". It compiles, as it has for months, but doesn't build. Even when I finagle the options so that it does build, it doesn't pass all the tests. That is only a way of hiding problems anyway, and I'm not going to claim a problem doesnt exist just because I can make it markedly harder to reproduce.
My plan at this point is probably to scrap my current branch, which has gotten noisy and messy, and start a fresh branch where I can start adding my collector in a more focused manner. There have definitely been some problems caused by bad merges in the past. Plus, I made plenty of exploratory changes and mistakes in the beginning of the summer, any one of which could be lurking in the dark and causing problems.
The summer may be over, but my work is far from it. I have a lot of work left to do on this GC before I can put my stamp of approval on it. There are some other projects I would like to work on from other ends of the Parrot-verse, so I now have some time to work on them as well. Specifically, I would like to do a little PIRC work, some IMCC cleanup work, and do some lurking in the pdd27mmd branch to see what help I can provide.
So, that's my final report, but not the final word and certainly not my final blog post here. Thanks to chromatic, Particle, Diet Coke, and all the other Parroteers who helped me out with this project so far. Thanks to all the people who are going to lend a hand to this project in the future too. Sorry to anybody else I missed, I'm sure there are more people who are deserving of some thanks and praise here.
