The path through language design

The haXe Blog has been opened for a few days now. It’s entirely written in haXe (see hxBlog to download sources) and will be open to other authors as well. I’m lacking the time to update my own blog so I think it’s better to group things on one blog with better visibility. I’ll continue to update this blog with posts that are not haXe-related.

For people that couldn’t attend, here’s my presentation slides Revolution 2 that I was showing at FOTB a few hours ago. Thanks to all the people that came here, it’s great to see such an interest into new way of doing things and I wish to all of you happy hours of haXe coding

The Slides (warning : PDF)

It’s been a long time since I had enough time to blog. The reason is that I’m currently lacking internet at home and my daily job day is too much busy to allocate blog time. I’m currently at Bordeaux Airport heading to Flash On The Beach, there’s free WiFi at airport so that’s a good reason enough to blog ! Sounds like FOTB will be a great conference, with great speakers and good mood. Hope to see a lot of people attending my talk Revolution 2 where I’ll be explaining about MTASC and haXe. If you’re a Flash developer who want to understand what haXe is and why it’s a Revolution for the Flash Coder, that’s a talk for you !

I’m usually writing a small mail when making a new release of haXe but for this 1.06 release, a lot of new things have been added which require maybe more explanations, hence a blog post. Let’s start !

• haxelib is a commandline tool for distributing and managing haXe libraries. Very easy to use, it will be a central repository for haXe open-source projects releases ! Read the Documentation.
• haXe 1.05 introduced Flash9 support. In 1.06, support has been enhanced with correction in the API files, support for Xml, Serialization and Remoting, and most important the ability to use assets stored in a SWF library built with any Flash IDE (including 7 and 8 ) . See this page for a tutorial.
• The neko.io package has been added. neko.File has been replaced by neko.io.File which methods either either returns a FileInput or a FileOutput, and neko.Socket becomes neko.io.Socket. The neko.io framework allow you to treat input/outputs uniformaly by having implementations extending either neko.io.Input or neko.io.Output. More details, documentation, and tutorials about this soon.
• haXe Serialization has been improved, with direct support for basic types such as Date, Hash, IntHash and List. A lot of unit tests and bugfixes have been made, and performances have been increased.
• a new haxe.xml Package is now available, which contains two classes haxe.xml.Fast allows quick dot-syntax access for Xml (still strictly typed) and haxe.xml.Check enable you to check if an Xml matches a given structure (a bit like DTD, but expressed in haXe code). More documentation an tutorials about this soon.
• the haxe.PosInfos which contains file/line/method/class information has been a bit changed. The specification is now “when a PosInfos is an optional argument, its default value will be the calling position instead of null”. See this tutorial about trace informations in haXe.
• Speaking of debugging, the -debug flag is now accepted by the haXe compiler. It currently has only effect when targeting neko or flash9. On neko, it replaces the file/line debug infos by a class/method/line infos. On flash9, there is already class/method infos so it adds file/line infos which will be displayed when an exception occured. I’m planning to support -debug in previous flash versions and javascript by enabling stack traces (although this should slowdown a bit).
• … and of course the usual bugfixes and minor improvements

OSCON 2006 is approaching. This year I’ll talk about haXe, a new web-oriented programming language. Be sure to come by if you’re near !

[Edit] Link to the Session | Slides (PDF)