Status report: February 2019

Posted on by Eric Bishton in Status Reports

This month I spent a bunch of time working on giving better error highlighting (of actual errors, now that we don’t highlight non-errors so much any more). The basic issue I was tackling was type differences. Things like numeric expressions, which in Haxe are always Floats being assigned to an Integer. This led me down a path of having to do better typing of expressions and some work toward top-down inference and monomorphs. I still have to deal with monomorphing of class fields/properties and structural sub-typing. Both of those are interesting and rather difficult to deal with. (You can look at the Haxe typer if you want a clue as to why.) At any rate, I was able to complete a substantial portion of work and made great headway.

What I worked on for our sponsor:

1) Type annotation cleanup: (ongoing)

  • Detect Float values being assigned to Int variables in variable declarations – including adding selectable quick fixes (such as “Wrap with Std.int()”). (merged – was in-review last month)
  • Detect incompatibility when initializing variables using type-tagged expressions (merged – was waiting for review);
  • Detect incompatibility when initializing variables using parenthesized expressions (merged – was waiting for review);
  • Detect incompatibility during assignment (merged – was in-progress)
  • Limited monomorph detection within a single method (merged – new)
  • Add one-click “quick-fixes” for automatic conversions to standard types, changing declared field type, etc. (merged – new)

What I worked on for the Community:

1) Add Haxe-specific tab settings page.

  • Refactor indent calculations; add “continuation” indenting (for multi-line expressions, parameter lists, etc.).

2) Some progress on the new UI for standard library locations. (It is going slow.)

Community Contributions:

None this month

Next month:

1) Finish tab settings pane.
2) Continue type annotation cleanup. (Sponsor priority)
3) Fix debugging C++ projects when build with Lime. (Currently looks like
an hxcpp issue.)
4) Add safeguards so that project rebuilds won’t erase directories outside
of the project tree.
4) Time for another release!
5) Fix class constructor being inappropriately renamed during class rename
refactoring. (FlowPlay list)
6) Continue UI for standard library locations.
7) Haxe 4 features?

Everybody have a great month.

-Eric