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My dad asked me why I walked to Stowmarket. To quote George Mallory, “because it’s there”.

Stowmarket is a pleasant but unremarkable market town in the middle of Suffolk. It’s a bit too hot for walking all day at the moment so I started in the late afternoon and arrived at half-time in the England-Spain match (a lot of people were standing around in pubs looking anxious).

A rather attractive path somewhere near Stowmarket

Download: nvc-1.13.1.tar.gz

This release is signed with my PGP key ID 74319F1A: nvc-1.13.1.tar.gz.sig

This is a major new release with a large number of improvements and bug fixes:

• Type and package generics now work correctly with components and configurations (#883).
• Fixed a crash when a matching case? alternative contains multiple choices (#890).
• Implemented VHPI support for package declarations and vhpiPackInsts iterators (#891).
• Signatures in attribute names are now parsed correctly (#892).
• Attribute specifications for all are now parsed correctly (#889).
• Predefined "=" and "/=" operators are no longer declared for file types.
• Alias of packages now work correctly (#893).
• Stricter checking of identifiers to reject those with multiple consecutive underscores or trailing underscores (from @typingArtist).
• Stricter checking for subprograms, deferred constants, and protected types referenced before their corresponding body or full declaration.
• Decimal physical literals like 8.2 ms are now correctly rounded (to 8200 us in this case) when they are converted to the base unit (#899).
• External names can now be passed as signal actuals to subprograms (#900).
• Fixed a crash when branch coverage is enabled and an if-statement contains a return (#903).
• The NVC_CONCURRENT_JOBS environment variable can be used to scale the number of worker threads NVC creates based on the number of concurrently executing simulations.
• Fixed a crash when certain attributes such as 'val are used in the target of a signal assignment statement (#908).
• Signals in packages are now dumped to the FST file (#901).
• Function interface declarations can now be pure or impure (#917).

As I was a bit tardy in putting out a blog post, here is a bonus maintenance release:

• Windows installer was missing some standard library files.
• Fixed a regression where generics and ports could not be referenced in external names (#921).
• Fixed a crash when an unconstrained port with a default value is associated with open.
• Fixed a duplicate symbol linker error with some uses of the 'delayed
  attribute.
• Fixed a crash when an aliased subprogram is matched by a generic subprogram <> (#924)
• Fixed a crash when a generic package containing a subprogram is passed to an entity package generic (#925).
• Fixed an intermittent "failed to suspend thread" fatal error on macOS (#922).
• Fixed a crash when a shared variable is declared inside a instantiated generic package in 2019 mode (#923).
• Fixed a crash when a port with unconstrained array-of-record type is associated with a signal that has a static subtype.
• Fixed incorrect longest static prefix calculation for array slices containing 'length, 'left, 'right and similar attributes (#930).
• Fixed wrong result when slicing a generic that has an unconstrained array type (#931).

The latest release can always be found on the GitHub releases page.

Special thank you to @bpadalino, @tmeissner, @Blebowski, @amb5l, @m42uko, @a-panella, @cmarqu, @albydnc, and @johonkanen for sponsoring me!

I’ve been fascinated by Corby for a while now, and my desire to travel there has taken on quest like properties similar to that time I wouldn’t stop talking about Selby. What’s so special about Corby you ask? Two facts: it once had an unemployment rate over 30% and its Asda sells more Irn-Bru per capita than anywhere else in England. These are somewhat related as the town was once dominated by a massive steel mill which attracted large numbers of Scottish migrant workers in the early twentieth century. When the steel mill closed in the 1980s it devastated the local economy.

I did this as a two day 51 mile epic as it’s quite difficult to travel anywhere other than south from Corby by train. Starting in Huntingdon which I walked to earlier in the year and finishing in Oakham in Rutland which I’ve also visited previously.

The going was very slow due to the atrocious state of the footpaths in some areas. Eventually late in the evening I discovered this unfinished 16th century manor house at Lyveden. It’s a National Trust property but you can freely walked around the grounds.

I was expecting Corby to be some nightmarish post-industrial hell-scape but it was actually just a normal mid-sized town. The steel mill is gone and replaced with huge logistics parks and warehouses. The main local landmark is The Cube, the rather imposing home of North Northamptonshire council which you can see in the photos below. The highlight of the short time I spent there was hearing someone in Greggs (presumably a local) speaking in a strong Scottish accent, proving that at least some of Corby’s cultural heritage is still alive and well.