Status of RARS

[privat]

Hi, since a year, we are using RARS in an academic setting at the Université du Québec à Montreal for the assembly course INF2171 (https://inf2171.uqam.ca/ if you're curious).
We have chosen RARS as the main tool as it is a beginner course, and we needed a powerful but simple IDE to develop in assembly and inspect the result with the runtime simulation.

We added more features and bug fixes https://github.com/privat/rars and wanted to integrate our code upstream. I did some PR and contacted the maintainer, but there was no real answer.
Currently, stopped submitting PR. Our fork is active, but we want again to reach the maintainer and other users and contributor of RARS to know :

1. what is the current status of the project ? Is it maintained or is @TheThirdOne MIA, bored or really busy with other things?
2. are some other people interested in using or contributing to RARS ?

[privat]

It's sad to have no feedback :(

Because I do not want to host the project in my namespace, I created and moved the fork to https://github.com/rarsm/rars
Our short-end goal is to fix some remaining issues before September (and the next assembly course) and have a stable 2.0 release for the students.

For the information, our fork is 200+ commits ahead upstream and with almost 40 merged PR.

[NickolayTernovoy]

@privat Thank you very much for continuing to support RARS!

[ruspl-afed]

Hello @privat
I'm thinking about porting RARS to Eclipse Platform because IDE part of RARS functionality intersects with Eclipse Debug a lot. However, I would like to keep the core part of RARS more or less free of any framework code to let people run it in headless mode, etc.
Since I'm not a part of university world, but rather an "Eclipse Toolsmith", I may miss some education-critical scenarios, so your input on the matter would be appreciated.

[privat]

Hi @ruspl-afed, maybe you want to open a new issue, as it is a distinct thing. The design of RARS (inherited from MARS) is quite clean, however, some parts are more coupled than necessary and modularizing and detaching the GUI might require some work. The IDE part is not the only GUI element, but there is also the register pane, memory dump, IO, plugins, etc. I do not know the work needed to make them compatible with Eclipse.
Personally, and from an education point a view, having a single and small jar file to distribute is an advantage (and no time wasted on configuration or technical support)