Brief history of Jallib on occasion of its 10th birthday.
(my personal view!)
This week Jallib exists 10 years, a good moment for some reflection....
Around 2007 I decided for PIC programming to switch from C to JAL.
Soon I discovered that there was no support ('device file') for my most
popular PICs, like the 16F690. I hoped that the INC2JAL program of Stef
Mientki would solve this vacuum, but it didn't really for several reasons.
I could have built an ad hoc solution for the 16F690, but I intended to use
also other newer PICs and wanted a more future-proof solution. So I decided
to build a program like INC2JAL, which became 'dev2jal', written in Rexx.
In stead of using the include files for MPLAB assembler (like INC2JAL) I
used
its '.dev' and .lkr files as reference. This combo contained all I needed.
When that gave adequate results I published the generated device files for
JalV2 and started in March 2008 a Google discussion group 'dev2jal' to
share,
discuss and improve 'm. Several people joined the group and helped in
various ways.
Not long thereafter it became clear that device files only didn't bring a
complete solution for JalV2 users and the naming convention chosen by me
for the device files wasn't compatible with most of the then existing Jal
libraries. So in July 2008 it was decided by the dev2jal group to start a
new Google group 'Jallib' with the aim to provide a set of functional
libraries based on and in combination with these device files.
In the beginning most of the Jallib libraries were one-to-one conversions
of Stef Mientki's collection, later libraries were added by several authors.
Over the years the process of generating Jallib device files has undergone
several changes. Some of these were needed to support PICs with new features
or to accomodate new libraries, others were forced by changes in MPLAB.
A major change in the generation process was in 2013: the switch from MPLAB
to MPLAB-X and in stead of using .dev and .lkr files the .edc files were
chosen because these contained a complete description of the PIC.
But already about one year later I switched to .pic files of MPLAB-X as
reference, because these use XML notation, much more convenient and
reliable for parsing and extracting the required input for the device files.
BTW: Reason to not use the .pic files from the beginning (in 2013) was
that these files were 'hidden' in a jar archive!
At the same time the script was also converted from Rexx to Python language.
Python was considered to be more suitable, especially because of its support
of xml. Another reason was that it would be easier to run the device files
generation process under other operating systems.
A side effect: the size of the main script dropped from approx. 5000 to 3500
lines of code.
Regardless the numerous MPLAB/MPLAB-X releases and internal changes
compatibility with existing Jallib libraries was maintained!
The complete device generation process consists of running a series of
Python scripts, not all made by me, and some scripts produce info for
some libraries (e.g. ADC). Even though the scripts are documented, it is
still a rather complex process. Therefore I've built an 'all-in-one' script
which calls all these scripts in the required sequence.
Now it is possible to generate new device files with a single button-push
(well almost, Microchip has always surprises with new versions of MPLAB-X).
This all-in-one script runs fine under Linux and Windows (possibly MacOS
as well) and it made the road free for a hand-over of the process to someone
else. In 2017 Rob Jansen offered to take over and since beginning of
2018 he is in charge! Not only that, he also became co-manager/owner of
the Jallib (Google) discussion group. I know that he takes these tasks
very seriously! Thanks, Rob!
This week (to be exact: tomorrow, the 25th of July 2018) Jallib exists
10 years.
This seems to me a perfect moment to say goodbye to JAL and Jallib!
The last years my interests have shifted gradually away from 8-bits PICs
in the direction of 32-bits architectures like ESP8266, ESP32, PyBoard, and
also Raspberry Pi. And Python is my favourite programming language for all
of these.
I would like to thank all Jallib contributers and users for their efforts
to help making Jallib a success. It was a pleasure to work with you.
I wish you all Jallib users lots of satisfaction with PICs, JalV2 and
Jallib.
Regards, Rob Hamerling
--
*Rob H*amerling, Vianen, NL
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