Information about the FireTorrent extension for Linux.
I've been meaning to - well, finish, really - FireTorrent for a while. But instead of actually doing it, I've decided to just screw it and release the current source as-is.
It currently compiled under Windows, and who knows, it may even compile under Linux! Haven't tried that yet.
It doesn't work yet, it's only partially complete, and all that. But it's something.
Well, I've been busy. Sorta. So, here's some status on what I'm working on.
Still porting it to C++. It loads .torrents successfully, but the majority of the protocol implementation needs to be done differently since C++ XPCOM allows a multithreaded approach.
I've made some graphical fixes which will be released as 0.7.5 shortly. My planned changes for version 1.0 currently crash Firefox. No, really.
I've stopped playing it. My user interface mods are, essentially, dead.
I think I've mentioned that JavaScript sucks before. This is why C++ is better:
d:/Firefox\mozilla\extensions\firetorrent\src\FTorrent.cpp(159) : error C2065: 'm_incompletePeers' : undeclared identifier
Hm? Oh, I accidently wrote "m_uncompletePeers" in the class header.
In JavaScript, this would have compiled, and I'd have to wait until something referenced m_incompletePeers to discover that I'd made a typo.
I like typed languages.
Just to update anyone actually paying attention to this, I've managed to get a native XPCOM component written that starts to implement the BitTorrent spec. Currently it just reads in the .torrent files, but it does that correctly, and uses C++ objects as opposed to JavaScript objects to contain the information. (Which was a challenge in and of itself, since C++ has no runtime type checking.)
I've also learned enough about the XPCOM string library to successfully create native strings, so that's cool too.
I've also added a new "topic" for FireTorrent, so if you want an RSS feed for FireTorrent information, you can head over to that category and grab the XML feed link on the bottom.
Well, I've been playing around with creating a BitTorrent client for Firefox, and have an implementation that kinda works in JavaScript.
Only problem is that it pegs out the CPU at around 100% and is markedly slower than it should be. (Maxed out at 30KB/s over loopback...)
Which means I missed the Extend Firefox contest. Fooey.
However, now I'm moving on from the, uh, "test implementation" to an implementation written in C++ using XPCOM. Hopefully that'll be capable of creating a working BitTorrent client that doesn't peg the CPU and downloads at a sane speed.