Stanisław Szymczyk Interview

Could you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in computers?
My name is Stanisław Szymczyk, I'm 26-year-old computer programmer from Poland.

My interest in computers is a natural continuation of my childhood fascination with technology and electronics. I'd been always taking apart things to see how do they work, sometimes managing to put them back together, sometimes not. I remember that once when I was very young a friend of my father came to fix our TV set - an old vacuum tube model. The magic light of vacuum tubes completely enchanted me. Later I started to build various electronic devices ranging from simple radio receivers through audio amplifiers to quite advanced things like EEG amplifiers and binaural beats generators.

Considering my attitude to technology it's nothing strange that I wanted to have a computer even before I saw a real one. But my wish hasn't been granted until I was in my teens. Before that I've spent countless hours reading about computers in "Bajtek" - one of the first Polish computer magazines. I was also harassing our neighbors, who had Commodore 64 and later various Amiga models. Finally one winter parents gave us (I have two brothers) an Amiga 600 as a Christmas present. We spent a very happy Christmas night playing the only game we had - Motörhead.

How did you become interested in AROS?
I remember reading news about AROS years ago in some polish magazine about Amiga computers, but treated it just as a curiosity back then.
I've came across AROS for the second time only recently. It was kind of surprising that this project still exists after all these years. At the time I've been enjoying a break from work, so I had enough time to make myself familiar with AROS. I tried building Linux hosted flavour, but it was not working on AMD64, so I started fixing it, and then I simply couldn't stop.

What kind of project or projects were you working on before you started programming for AROS?
My first programs were simple games and graphical effects written in AMOS - a BASIC dialect for Amiga, quite popular in early 90s. AMOS was pretty advanced for a BASIC, but not very fast. That's why I started learning assembler, I wanted to write programs working as fast as possible. One of my first early achievements was a clock program written in assembler. It was used by the local cable TV. My clock was on every TV in the town, I was so proud.

In high school I attended some demoscene parties and became a coder in a not very widely known Decree group, and later in Weeds. Then I started working on some demo effects that could be used in our productions, also I coded "The Deep" disc magazine and "Greenday" pack. Near the end of high school I wrote my first programs in C language. One project I remember from that time is vocabulary editor for a conversation simulator program called Denise.

Later I became a Computer Science student at University of Gdańsk and gradually lost contact with most of my demoscene friends. During that time I started using Debian GNU/Linux operating system - at first on Amiga 1200, then on PC. It took me some time to get rid of the prejudices towards PC humbly cultivated during my Amiga days. Even now I still irrationally dislike Intel processors. I've kept my prejudices towards Windows, as they were actually not prejudices, but simply truth. During the studies I've learned Java and some scripting languages like PHP and Perl, that allowed me to earn some money as a freelancer by creating web applications. University studends have lots of free time, most of them are spending it drinking and partying. I spent mine participating in various projects, for example I was responsible for the floppy disk driver and FAT filesystem handling in the experimental operating system created with some guys from the university. I also wrote client-server networking code for the chatterbot project called Aimi.

When the only thing left to do was finishing my thesis, I decided to move to Warsaw and find some full-time job. I started working there as a Java programmer and spent a year and half maintaining financial software. That made me familiar with J2EE technologies, but it wasn't very exciting. I was always interested in artificial intelligence and wanted to see if I can do some research in the field, so I quit the job and started exploring the topic of language learning. During that time I created my first projects in C++: an implementation of the model of object recognition in visual cortex and a robot simulator for my experiments in developmental robotics.

You have accepted the AROS Self-Compiling bounty. What kind of experience do you have that allows you to work on a project like this?
AROS Self-Compiling bounty requires porting of a lot of GNU software to AROS. Knowledge of both Amiga and Unix worlds is needed to do this. I was Amiga programmer for about seven years and I've been programming on Linux even longer. I think that makes me a good candidate for the job. Besides, I'm good at bug hunting, I've been doing that a lot when working on this bounty.


What is the status of the AROS Self-Compiling bounty at this time?
It's almost completed, I've just finished uploading the necessary packages. Now everyone should be able to self-compile AROS using the nightly builds and additional packages from The AROS Archives: Perl, Python, Autoconf, Automake and LZO library. I've built AROS on AROS a dozen of times now, both on native and Linux hosted AROS, so its ability to self-compile should be in pretty good shape.


Could you explain what self-compilation means to AROS? In what ways does this help the AROS operating system?
Self-compilation means that people can build AROS without the need for another operating system, so theoretically it's now possible to live with AROS alone. Theoretically, because some improvements are still needed to make it bearable. I don't expect AROS developers to switch to AROS in force, since it would make their work much harder. A good debugger is needed first and a port of Subversion, but even that won't make AROS a good OS for developers - it has no memory protection, so it's easy to crash the whole system due to some stupid bug in the code.

But even considering that, ports of GNU software created for this bounty will make developer's life with AROS easier, because now it has a fully-fledged GNU development environment with Autotools, GNU Make port, and ability to run configure shell scripts. It's now possible to build a lot of open source software directly on AROS, without the need for making them cross-compilable and integrating into AROS build system. For example recently I had to port a few packages needed for NetSurf and I simply built them on AROS without any changes, it was so easy!

I think that the greatest improvement self-compiling bounty made for AROS users. It freed AROS users from developer's monopoly to port and build software for AROS. In my opinion the border between users and developers shouldn't be that strict. On Linux is a natural thing for users to build software from the source code, I'd love to see the same on AROS. Ability to modify and rebuild AROS also allows users to contribute to their operating system by submitting patches with their changes. Even small improvements like fixing some bugs, correcting wrong spelling or adding new locale are still making AROS better. It's really sad that in the long history of AROS nobody has ever contributed a patch to its SourceForge tracker.

Have you thought about any projects you would like to develop for AROS in the future?
I'm currently working on a NetSurf browser port for AROS. Besides that, I'm going to do some general improvements like fixing bugs, refactoring the code and adding missing documentation. But the first project I want to develop after completing the bounty is taking some rest.

In your opinion, what features could greatly improve AROS at this point?
AROS is still haunted by the problems with ATA driver. A thorough test of the driver on various chipsets and fixing remaining bugs is a must.
The same goes with USB support, I've heard there are still some problems with basic devices like mouse and keyboard. Zune needs a lot of bug-fixing too. As you can see, it's mostly about improving the quality of existing code base, AROS needs that a lot.

Considering new features I'd like to see at least partial memory protection and better exception handling. Currently it's very easy to crash AROS, implementing these features would make a big improvement, especially for developers.

On my personal AROS wish list there is a decent pager working on abc-shell and some new Shell features like scrollable command history and ability to select, copy and paste a block of text. POSIX termios interface is closing my wish list, it would allow to easily port a lot of great console-based software to AROS.


What applications would you like to see available for AROS?
A good debugger. Also I'd like to see a network stack better integrated with AROS - without the need for editing configuration files, with a simple GUI allowing to configure the network. Then a movie player and a modern web browser.

What is your opinion about a web browser for AROS?
It's absolutely necessary to have a modern web browser. Most people won't take seriously an operating system without it. Modern web browser would also serve as a platform for using online applications that could fill some gaps in software available on AROS, like office suite for example.

Do you think it will still take a large amount of work to complete a 1.0 release of AROS?
Unfortunately yes. In my opinion the hardest work needed for AROS 1.0 is completing ABI_V1 changes that Staf Verhaegen is currently working on. It may take many months to finish, I hope that more developers join the effort. Krzysztof Śmiechowicz did an excellent job with the API review, currently he's updating AROS 1.0 roadmap to reflect the current state of AROS, so it should be pretty clear soon what other work is still needed for the 1.0 release.

Do you currently own any Amiga's?
I have an Amiga 1200 with 68040 40 MHz CPU and 8 MB of fast memory. I'm not using it anymore, though. Perhaps the coming Natami project will turn me into an active Amiga user again.

What are your thoughts about Amiga OS 4.1 and MorphOS?
I've been following Amiga-related news only casually until now, so I don't have much knowledge about these operating systems and their capabilities. But I think that it's a good thing that people still want to buy and use them - even considering the high price of hardware needed. That means the spirit of Amiga is still alive in people's hearts. However looking at various animosities between the AmigaOS4 and MorphOS worlds is really saddening. Amiga community has become divided and thus weaker.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
Currently I'm most comfortable with C, Java, Perl and C++, but in the past I also wrote programs in various assemblers, PHP, Python, Ruby and Prolog. I don't have a favorite language, usually I'm simply using the most suitable one for the given purpose.


Do you plan to learn other languages? If so, which ones?
I'm going to become more familiar with C++, its expressive power combined with C-like performance is very appealing.

Do you admire the work of any specific programmers?
Not a particular one, but I definitely admire the work of all open source programmers for making the world a better place.

Do you still enjoy using Linux? What distribution or distributions are your favorite?
I enjoy using Linux very much, especially due to its rock-like stability and high performance. In the past I used Debian, I liked its flexibility and lack of assumptions about user, it was easy to tailor the system to specific needs. I dislike distributions designed for some imaginary average user, installing a lot of software that I won't ever need and forcing their own choices about GUI frameworks, window managers and system configuration. My current Linux distribution of choice is Gentoo, I switched to Gentoo because of its package management system allowing to easily integrate new software into the system package tree.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
I'd like to thank the #AROS channel crowd for all the support and interest in AROS Self-Compiling project. Also I want to express my gratitude to all people who donated their money to AROS Self-Compiling bounty.