OpenEuphoria

Re: Euphoria 4.2 still needs help!

• Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Oct 26, 2023
• 1005 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