OpenEuphoria

1. Euphoria 4.2 still needs help!

• Posted by ghaberek (admin) in October
• 775 views

Forked from Re: IUP 3.31

Here is where I currently stand.

I have a full-time job, a spouse, two kids, and "several" hobbies. To say my free time is limited would be an understatement, but I try to put as much of that limited free time as I can towards Euphoria. I have acquired a laptop specifically for use as a development machine. Euphoria isn't paying the bills so this laptop is cheap and slow but also light and portable. I can easily take it places, unlike my home "gaming" laptop. I have found a third place, specifically a new makerspace in my area, where I can spend some time each week sitting quietly (or at least undisturbed and without distraction) to focus specifically on Euphoria. These are very recent changes but they're a big step in the right direction. I also recently closed off the 2023 survey, as responses seemed to taper off through September. I'm about halfway done compiling the results and I will have a list of notes and comments soon, hopefully by the end of the year.

I have a lot of the build process figured out now including working build for 64-bit ARM. The build process still isn't great but it's stable enough to move forward with other tasks. My current priority is to update the GitHub actions script to publish "nightly" builds for most platforms, including Windows (X86/X86_64) and Linux (X86/X86_64/ARM/ARM64) but probably not Mac OS yet. These builds will include the bare minimum in a zip file: binaries, standard library, and HTML documentation. No demos, no source code, no Windows installer, no distro packages, etc. From there I'll blend in the new features I've been working on. One new feature will be added at a time and I'll need everyone testing these things as they come out so we can find any lingering bugs. New features so far include, in no particular order: foreign function interface (libffi), cryptographic hashes (SHA2, etc.), gzip compression, zip files, JSON parser, template parser, libCURL, SQLite3, and IUP.

I still need help with the checking/closing/updating tickets and updating/proofreading documentation. Honestly, at this point I'm less concerned about what we do and more concerned that we do something... anything. But whoever brings a solution to the table needs to own it and see it through from start to finish. My suggestion would be to move tickets and documentation to GitHub's issues and wiki respectively, and leave this website as the news and forum. I can help accommodate whatever you'd like to do. Other options for documentation might be something like Read the Docs or GitHub Pages, or just focus on updating and extending eudoc, but in the end Creole needs to go away as it clearly lost its format war with Markdown years ago.

As they say, "many hands make light work." Currently my hands are quite full, and that makes every task very heavy.

-Greg

3. Re: Euphoria 4.2 still needs help!

• Posted by ChrisB (moderator) in October
• 738 views

Hi

Take care Greg, the last thing the Euphoria Project needs is you burning out.

Some thoughts.

Is it worthwhile dropping the 4.2 number, and going straight to Eu 5.0. With the change in build, and architectures (x86/X86_64/Arm) and the new ffi library I propose that now is the time.

I've been doing some messing about with Liberty Basic, FreeBasic and Purebasic, and one thing that struck me is that they are ready to go right out the box - ide, editor, gui builder, graphics demos, and maybe even a game or two, ready to load and click run. This is what grabs new users. As it stands Eu needs a bit of setting up, choosing your editor, setting paths, remembering eu.cfg, searching for a limited set of included demos, and a frequently non working set of user contributions.

What I propose therefore is to take some of these ideas from other programming languages, and incorporate them into what would be fresh Eu5 install. With that in mind, here would be an initial setup.

Eu     ---> Core binaries 
       ---> core libraries 
           ---> current std libraries 
           ---> ffi 
           ---> gui library - rec IUP 
           ---> a simple gui builder, called from WEE 
           ---> a graphics library - rec SDL2 
           ---> a sound library (1 of soloud / bass / fmod) 
           ---> user libraries - users add their own libraries here 
           -- > projects, doesn't matter where the user puts them, the eu.cfg system takes care of it. 
       ---> an editor - Rec WEE (written in eu) (This is what starts when the user starts 'euphoria') 
       ---> demos 
          --> std lib demos 
          --> gui demos 
          --> simple but many game demos - which means graphics sound and input demos. New users love to see what the language can do 
       ---> manual / docs - chm, pdf or HTML format - follow the standard format (language definition, keywords etc) 
--> 32/64 bit / arm versions of each where possible 

Note, and this is deliberate, no eu compilation directories - easily added from github if the user is interested enough to look at these.

Doing it like this not anly defines what is should look like, but allows compartmentalisation of development - everyone (interested parties) can have their own section to work on, also focuses development, rather than getting sidetracked by adding another library (yes, I'm looking at you Icy-prolific-library-creator) and allows the creation of an 'out of the box' experience for new users.

This all needs work, but creates the bite sized ethos. Also forget about tickets, do bug fixes - no one cares about tickets that the tier one developers (Greg, Icy, Jim, others(don't get upset)) don't have time to look at, but everyone cares about their own bug.

Any way, this is just my vision, and ultimately only a suggestion, so what do you thimk?

Chris