1. A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by twbeaty Aug 07, 2008
- 1057 views
Hello all ...
Since I've been out of the Euphoria loop for a year or so, I'm taking some time here trying to get back up to speed. That being the case, I have a couple of questions. Sorry if this is old news, but I didn't see a "Search" button or anything of the like. A lot of these questions are prompted by the fact that I am working on a project that will most likely take long enough that version 4 will have a stable release before I get done.
So, of course, the first question is this: has there been any sort of "off-the-cuff" target date made for the release of version 4? If it is going to be three months from now, I might as well go ahead and get Version 4, and use that for my development. OTOH, if that's still a year out, I'd best stay with 3.1.
Are most Euphoria users at this point using 3.1 or 4.0?
And finally, I perused the docs and noticed that there are a lot of changes happening to the core of the language, such as platform() going away. Is there going to be backward compatibility or is Version 4 going to break code? That's fine if it is, but I'll need to plan to migrate my code.
It looks like a lot of hard work has gone on in my absence! I'm looking forward to jumping back into the pool.
Travis.
2. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Aug 07, 2008
- 1132 views
Hello all ...
Since I've been out of the Euphoria loop for a year or so, I'm taking some time here trying to get back up to speed. That being the case, I have a couple of questions. Sorry if this is old news, but I didn't see a "Search" button or anything of the like.
Sorry. The search button will be come around soon. This is a brand new forum system and it still has a bit to go to be fully functional.
A lot of these questions are prompted by the fact that I am working on a project that will most likely take long enough that version 4 will have a stable release before I get done.
So, of course, the first question is this: has there been any sort of "off-the-cuff" target date made for the release of version 4? If it is going to be three months from now, I might as well go ahead and get Version 4, and use that for my development. OTOH, if that's still a year out, I'd best stay with 3.1.
I would say that three months is a realistic time frame, maybe sooner. We are just about to release the first alpha. We are hoping that people will pick it up and bug test like crazy so that bug reports will come in quickly and soon after the release, not 2 days before we decide to release a final 
Are most Euphoria users at this point using 3.1 or 4.0?
I am sure most are on 3.1. 4.0 has not been released in any real binary form yet. I do make just the binaries available at http://jeremy.cowgar.com/eubins/ but you still have to get the non-binary files from svn, http://rapideuphoria.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rapideuphoria/trunk
And finally, I perused the docs and noticed that there are a lot of changes happening to the core of the language, such as platform() going away. Is there going to be backward compatibility or is Version 4 going to break code? That's fine if it is, but I'll need to plan to migrate my code.
platform() isn't really going away, but there will be very little real use for it with the new ifdef system in existence. It accomplishes everything platform() did and much, much more including better performance.
4.0 will break some code, but we expect it to be very little. The only areas that will break are if you use one of the new keywords or built-in routine names as an identifier yourself. For instance, we added entry and continue as new keywords in 4.0 and some people seem to have used those as variable names. You will have to change your variable names.
4.0 will come with all the old 3.x include files because all of the new standard library is now placed in C:\euphoria\include\std ... This will mean that the vast majority of 3.x apps will continue to run unaltered.
It looks like a lot of hard work has gone on in my absence! I'm looking forward to jumping back into the pool.
It's going to be a lot of fun! btw... you asked if most people are on 4.0, I said probably not, but I for one am so use to the 4.x features all of my code is 4.0. I think I forget how to program in anything < 4.0
Jeremy
3. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by murphy Aug 07, 2008
- 1041 views
Travis:
In my opinion, the benefits in 4.0 outweigh the slight chance of bugs. I've been using it for quite a while now, and have not had any problems except with the switch statement, and that was fixed recently.
By benefits, I mean that 4.0 has some features which make development easier, code clearer, and there's less reinventing of the wheel involved.
Not to mention the fact that until someone tries building large apps with 4.0, whatever bugs remain will stay hidden.
4. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by twbeaty Aug 07, 2008
- 1044 views
- Last edited Aug 08, 2008
Hello Jeremy.
I would say that three months is a realistic time frame, maybe sooner. We are just about to release the first alpha. We are hoping that people will pick it up and bug test like crazy so that bug reports will come in quickly and soon after the release, not 2 days before we decide to release a final
Wow, three months is close damn close in terms of my project, since I'm looking at about six months before I am far enough along to release it and make it meaningful. I did download what appeared to be the latest snapshot of the binaries from your site. Unfortunately, it would seem that the remainder of the files is a one-at-a-time proposition. I am hoping for the whole tamale being zipped up for a beta soon. Right now, I don't have a Linux machine handy, but I have found a Subversion client that I can use and I am downloading it now. (Bit of an assumption that you folks are using Subversion.) Any chance I can do an anonymous checkout?
- Travis.
(my account name) -at- gee mail.
5. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by twbeaty Aug 07, 2008
- 1038 views
- Last edited Aug 08, 2008
Hello Murphy ...
Travis:
In my opinion, the benefits in 4.0 outweigh the slight chance of bugs. I've been using it for quite a while now, and have not had any problems except with the switch statement, and that was fixed recently.
By benefits, I mean that 4.0 has some features which make development easier, code clearer, and there's less reinventing of the wheel involved.
Not to mention the fact that until someone tries building large apps with 4.0, whatever bugs remain will stay hidden.
You are no doubt right. I was just thinking in terms of how to make the project (a library) usable for the greatest number of people in the community. If Jeremy's forecast of three months is correct, I might as well target version 4, since it will be longer than three months before I'm ready to make a release.
I'm going to start reading the docs for 4.0 presented here on the site this evening. As far as "Equity" being a large library, really I don't foresee it being any larger than say euGTK or win32lib, but it may be big enough to run 4.0 through its paces a time or two. The hold-up at the moment is the time I need to devote to my ... ahem ... "real" job, and family concerns.
- Travis.
6. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Aug 07, 2008
- 1086 views
- Last edited Aug 08, 2008
I'm going to start reading the docs for 4.0 presented here on the site this evening. As far as "Equity" being a large library, really I don't foresee it being any larger than say euGTK or win32lib, but it may be big enough to run 4.0 through its paces a time or two. The hold-up at the moment is the time I need to devote to my ... ahem ... "real" job, and family concerns.
You can download a .tar.gz of the SVN tree via:
http://rapideuphoria.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/rapideuphoria/trunk.tar.gz?view=tar
Also, be sure you get the latest .zip file. The .tar.gz's are for Linux. btw... What is "Equity" ? You have me interested now
Jeremy
7. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by twbeaty Aug 07, 2008
- 1089 views
- Last edited Aug 08, 2008
You can download a .tar.gz of the SVN tree via:
http://rapideuphoria.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/rapideuphoria/trunk.tar.gz?view=tar
Also, be sure you get the latest .zip file. The .tar.gz's are for Linux. btw... What is "Equity" ? You have me interested now
Jeremy
The tarball is downloaded, thanks! Equity (or eQT, haven't cemented that down yet but the first one sounds better) will be a Euphoria widget toolkit using QT http://www.trolltech.com. It's a project I've been mulling around for a few years, but now finally have time to get around to it. My hope is that it will be easy to develop cross platform apps in Euphoria with it. We'll see. Qt itself is available on Linux (of course, it's the backbone of KDE), Windows, and MacOS, and a couple others I forget atm. I really love Qt when coding in C, and I think it would be a remarkable pairing with Euphoria.
- Travis.
8. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by murphy Aug 07, 2008
- 1046 views
- Last edited Aug 08, 2008
I'm going to start reading the docs for 4.0 presented here on the site this evening. As far as "Equity" being a large library, really I don't foresee it being any larger than say euGTK or win32lib, but it may be big enough to run 4.0 through its paces a time or two. The hold-up at the moment is the time I need to devote to my ... ahem ... "real" job, and family concerns.
- Travis.
Since you mentioned it, you may have seen my post recently about the new version of EuGTK being about 1/5 the size of the old. Much of that comes from a couple of new features: #1 (on my list) is the ability to have optional/defaulted parameters to funcs/procs. That greatly simplifies things, and makes possible a pretty dramatic restructuring in some cases.
I even managed to find a couple of valid uses for goto.
Now you've got me curious - what is this "Equity" of which you speak?
9. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by twbeaty Aug 07, 2008
- 1077 views
- Last edited Aug 08, 2008
As I mentioned above, it will pretty much be an euGTK for us QT lovers. I'm really hoping for cross platform goodness here, especially in terms of the Euphoria side of the code, which I don't believe will need to be modified between Windows and Linux at all, as long as the appropriate shared libraries are present.
There will be some troubles along the way to be sure, the biggest being how to deal with QT's SIGNAL/SLOT mechanism, which is so mired up in preprocessor macros that it boggles the mind. So I will need to go a different, unfortunately less elegant, route.
- Travis.
10. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Aug 07, 2008
- 1066 views
- Last edited Aug 08, 2008
As I mentioned above, it will pretty much be an euGTK for us QT lovers. I'm really hoping for cross platform goodness here, especially in terms of the Euphoria side of the code, which I don't believe will need to be modified between Windows and Linux at all, as long as the appropriate shared libraries are present.
Travis, Euphoria is now supported on Intel based Macs too.
Jeremy
11. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by twbeaty Aug 08, 2008
- 1023 views
- Last edited Aug 09, 2008
Travis, Euphoria is now supported on Intel based Macs too.
Jeremy
Ah, nice! There are also QT libraries for the Mac, so that would definitely add to the goodness. I would eventually like to get a Mac to play with and develop on, but at the moment it's a bit out of my price range.
- Travis.
12. Re: A Few Questions from a Guy That's Been Out of the Loop
- Posted by twbeaty Aug 08, 2008
- 1058 views
- Last edited Aug 09, 2008
You can download a .tar.gz of the SVN tree via:
http://rapideuphoria.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/rapideuphoria/trunk.tar.gz?view=tar
Also, be sure you get the latest .zip file. The .tar.gz's are for Linux. btw... What is "Equity" ? You have me interested now
Jeremy
I unzipped the tarball, added the binaries that I downloaded earlier to its "bin," folder, then replaced C:\EUPHORIA with the contents of the unzipped tarball. I've run a couple of the demos. Other than having to edit one of them to add the "std\" in front of the standard includes, everything seems to be working. Hope I installed it right. :-S
The interpreter identifies itself as 4.0 (Development) ... SVN Revision 995. Hopefully that's the latest revision.
- Travis.
