Month 3 - Blog 5 - Gateware Development

 These last two weeks have been quite hectic to say the least with Gateware. As development continues with GNodeFactory (GNF) a couple of hurdles came along. First was how to actually store the data within GTL's Factory architecture since I was still getting the hang of it. GNF is supposed to be structured as a factory containing multiple root factories. These root factories will help manage threads and computations making operations faster than single threaded executions. I initially was not able to fully grasp how the implementation would look, but after some time with a single root factory I slowly was able to understand and created the below implementation so far. Previously there was going to be a pool for the State and Meta information in their own factories as well, but after discussing some storage and accessing viewpoints with Lari we decided it was optimal to keep the information within the Internal Node structure. This makes looking up the information faster since there is no need to perform additional access operations. 

This led into the next task for implementing allocate and deallocate for GNF. Whenever Allocate is called, it will attempt to recycle an existing pool identifier before creating a new one. With this design I choose to create a pool of root nodes wherever is available first. Deallocating performs the inverse by validating the data is available to remove then cleans up any associated data pools and recycling their identifiers. Since this task was done in the previous week portion for this blog post, I have now code reviewed and merge requested the Allocation/Deallocation of GNF with Lari.

Moving forwards to the bulk of this previous weeks work: Parenting and Unparenting. There were some challenges at first to Parenting and Unparenting, first was making sure the calculation was one with the proper inverse performed on the parent nodes rotation. One issue that I found while writing the unit tests was that if I wanted a duplicate index to unparent then the operation should technically fail since I shouldn't be able to unparent an already unparented node. Provided that most of the implementation still stays relatively the same, I believe Parenting and Unparenting are nearly complete as of this post being written.

This milestone also covered reading and writing to the nodes, matrices, and meta data while keeping reading of the states non-writeable. State information regarding the nodes would be purely manipulated internally since there should be no reason to modify a parent/child/sibling/depth/flags associated within the nodes. Unit tests to validate that these operations are performing as suspected are also being written since validation and unit tests are required for very part of Gateware.

Moving forward into the next two weeks I will be focusing more so on implementing the resolving of the hierarchy and ensuring that all data within GNF uses the flags properly. There will be many.. many more unit tests to cover with more implementations and samples near the end of that.