Status Report: January 2018

Posted on by Eric Bishton in Status Reports

This month’s status report is a bit late coming because I wanted to report on some things I thought you’d be excited about!

Pre-release Build Available

There’s a test build available on my personal github fork.  You can read the release notes here.  A couple of highlights.

  • Flash debugging fixes:  For OpenFL, We no longer use the “lime test” build command.  Instead we use its component “lime update,” “lime build,” and “lime run” commands. There should be much less chance of a time-out now that the debugger won’t start until after a successful build and won’t have to wait for the build to complete after the debugger has already started and is waiting for a connection.  In other words, the old method was: 1) start debugger (which waits for the app to connect) 2) lime test (which internally ran a build);  the new method is 1) lime update, 2) lime build, 3) start debugger, 4) lime run.  This also allows removing the Pre-Run “Build” task to be effective now — you can run the .SWF file from the last successful build.
  • Some fixes to improve error recognition and reporting.  Flash target builds should now always stop if there is a build error.
  • Folding has been implemented. You can now fold many types of sections within your code:
    + Imports and using sections (Thanks to Ilya Malanin! a.k.a. @mayakwd)
    + Classes, Methods, and, really, anything with curly braces (Also, thanks to Ilya.)
    + Compiler conditional sections (#if, etc.)
    + And, per FlowPlay’s specific request… Commented regions, so your sections marked with “//region Title … //endregion” can now be collapsed to a single line.
  • Support for HL and CPPIA targets.

The test build also has a number of the new things that we expect to release in the next week or so.  We are waiting for me to get the IDEA 2017.3-specific bugs fixed and then it will roll out.  In the mean time, if you have some time, Please, Please, test it!

Other things I worked on this month:

  • Removing IDEA v14 and 15 support.
  • Adding IDEA 2018.1 build support.
  • Parsing Haxe project files and keeping the IDEA project settings in sync with them. (Incomplete.)

Things the community contributed:

  • Several NPE fixes for scenarios that I don’t usually see.  (Multiple contributors.)
  • Initial folding support for import statements and body blocks. (Ilya)
  • Wild-card imports optimization. (Ilya)
  • Rework resolving for imports. (Ilya)

Next month’s goals:

  • Flash target builds should now always stop if there is a build error.
  • 0.12.0 release (or maybe we’ll call it 1.0?).
  • More work toward parsing and syncing project files, leading to the automatic managing of compiler conditional definitions.