New beta of PortablE (r6, the beginner-friendly release)

I have uploaded a new PortablE beta of my modernised AmigaE programming language. There have been a HUGE amount of changes since the last beta in April, but biggest changes are:

* Fully tested on AROS & MorphOS (in addition to AmigaOS4), so all the examples now run smoothly & stably. Please download some of the already compiled examples & try them out

* Programs now compile on Icaros v.1.3.x, although an AROS bug in Icaros v1.3.0 to v1.3.2 means that the graphical examples won't look good. Icaros v1.3.3 should fix that.

* The GUI module (std/cGui) now supports basic scrollable lists & pictures in buttons (see here for an example), plus many bug fixes.

* The graphics module (std/cGfx) now supports resizable windows, can draw circles, and has been heavily fixed & speeded-up for AROS & MorphOS.

* Added basic networking support for AmigaOS4, which is compatible with AmigaE.

* Added the "Debug" switch to PEGCC, which makes debugging on OS4 much easier. PEGCC also behaves better.

* The sound & music modules (std/cSnd & std/cMusic) now gracefully handle the lack of AHI sound, instead of crashing!

* OPT MULTITHREADED should now be properly thread-safe, especially FastNew/NEW/etc.

* A large number of fixes & tweaks to various things, plus added a couple more Amiga modules, and some missing OS4 functions.


You can download the latest beta of PortablE here.

Some screenshots to show what PortablE is capable of in a relatively small amount of code:



As a reminder, in February I released a "full preview" of the next version of the PortablE programming language. It is now aimed at beginners & those new to the E language. Previous releases of PortablE were aimed at existing AmigaE users, and those familiar with AmigaOS programming. But after more than a year of development, PortablE became much easier for beginners to pick-up & play with:

* It now comes with some nice modules for graphics, sound, music & GUIs. These require no knowledge of AmigaOS programming, and were inspired by the simplicity of BASIC languages like AMOS.

* It comes with full documentation for all of these modules, along with smaller & bigger examples. There is also an official PortablE forum.

* The documentation has been revamped to be more beginner friendly, and the PortablE installer has been made easier to use. If you still get stuck, then let me know, and I will see what I can do


* In addition to that, I have made available a large collection of my own useful modules (in the CSH folder), which you can use if you want. These are not properly documented yet, but I will look at documenting them where there is interest.

* As usual it supports Amiga OS4, OS3, AROS, MorphOS & Windows. However (1) the new modules do not yet work on Windows, and (2) the new graphics module does not yet work on Amiga OS3.

@ChrisH

Seems mature more and more. Expectually improvements in the graphics modules pretty interesting. I even think now "maybe its time to try to write something via portable" :)

New release is tested succesfully on my ami-lineapolis. From last offical version I confirm that there is a lot of positive changes. Congratulations to release new PortablE version. My software now working under AROS, so more peoples will can use it - I release it soon! Thanks Chris for all job.

I have now released three more examples:

Example 12: Clock.e (click this line)


Example 13: Mandel.e (click this line)


Example 14: Pythagoras.e (click this line)

I have now released two more examples:

Example 15: StarsXY_ToySpaceshipSprite1.e (click this line)


Example 16: StarsZYX_ToySpaceshipSprite1.e (click this line)

I haven't really paid much attention to OS4 coding but the language looks pretty decent.

The lack of curly braces and semicolons is nice.

- Double post -

I have now released two more examples:

Example Example 17: IfsFern.e (click this line)


Example Example 18: cosmic_deluxe.e (click this line)

Quote:
Yeah, it is . I have a fairly high dislike for C-style syntax.

Today (5th March 2012) I have uploaded a new PortablE beta of my modernised AmigaE programming language. While development has moved slower, I have still made a lot of bug fixes, plus added some new features:

* The Amiga installer has been greatly improved. It uses choice requesters, it has a Simple Installation mode, you can finally change the PEmodules assignment, and more. Thanks to Hypex for suggestions!

* Added some new functions to the cGfx & cGfxSprites modules.

* cGui windows now receive a close request when Exchange tries to remove the app.

* cSnd has been heavily rewritten, and should be rock-solid (not that I noticed a problem before).

* cPath now properly supports soft & hard links.

* Added support for AmigaOS4's application.library .

* Greatly improved memory handling; no-longer becomes very slow in certain situations, won't crash when allocation requests fail (ouch), and also handles low-memory situations better.

* On AmigaOS4 executable sizes have been reduced by up to 60-120KB, thanks to an OS4 SDK discovery made by Kas1e.

* cGfx's drawCircle() now works correctly.

* Fixed various small bugs.


I have also replaced the "Shadow Of The Beast like" demo with one that is much closer to the original game.

I look forward to checking this out myself,

The only question I have is whether you will have any "library mode" for developing AmigaOS4.x or other platform libraries?
possibly just making object files able to be output and linked afterwards?

Curious as the original AmigaE by Wouter had a library mode and inherited a detail from SAS/C style startup code.

Quote:
That's a possibility, but not in the near future anyway.

Well I would request that you ignore any special "library" mode and instead of that have an option to make a linkable object being output instead of an EXE.

That way if someone wants to write a library or the startup code themselves (such as myself) there is no limitation on doing such things as libraries and devices with AmigaE.

I would like to see PortablE able to stand on its own with compilation and linking able to be staged if required

Quote:
That is certainly more likely - but I don't want to promise anything (unless it is literally the next thing on my To Do list).

Today (20th March 2012) I have uploaded a new PortablE beta of my modernised AmigaE programming language. Fixes a couple of serious problems:

* Fixed a video memory leak caused by bitmaps not being auto-deallocated when the program quits (nor when the window is destroyed), for the 'std/cGfx' module.

* Worked-around the installer failing on Icaros v1.4.0, because it comes with an incorrect config file.


There are also a couple of smaller improvements:

* If you let the installer move the PEmodules folder on Icaros, then you would get a harmless error message every time Icaros booted. Now fixed.

* You can now use CreateGfxWindow() & DestroyGfxWindow() with the 'std/cGfxSpritesSimple' module

Thanks for another great release.
With this release I'm capable create graphical software packed with sprites and layers, and in future maybe I write "Amiga other platform killer software" (for example ami-lineapolis is killing other morpion software - but not so many users interested that game so it killer but not adding new users for AmigaOS4). Anyway I think my flowerway software is nice example "power of PortablE" and example precise software created by amateur-beginner.
So I think that with support Chris anyone can also try coding in PortablE!

Today (9th April 2012) I have uploaded a new PortablE beta of my modernised AmigaE programming language. This brings the 'std/cGfx' module close to being finished:

* The 'std/cGfx' module now uses Compositing/Alpha-blending (where supported) for h/w accelerated drawing of masked bitmaps. This means the new SOTB demo is now fast & smooth on AmigaOS4 & MorphOS.

* The 'std/cGfx' module now supports screens <= 256 colours.

* For 'std/cGfx', added tentative AmigaOS3 support, and compiled almost all the examples for AmigaOS3. (I would be interested to know if they work on Natami.)


* For 'std/cGfx', added missing stuff like reading pixel colours, rotating bitmaps, and generating masks using pictures with more than 256 colours.

* For 'std/cGfx', scaling bitmaps is now much faster on AmigaOS4 (probably uses AltiVec acceleration).

* For 'std/cGfx', scaling masked bitmaps is MUCH faster on AROS. So the SOTB demo now starts quickly.

* For 'std/cGfx', fixed various bugs.

* For 'std/cPath', added the create() method as an (often nicer) alternative to open().


* Added Picasso96 & Cybergraphics modules.

* Added the missing CompositeTagList() for OS4.

* PEGCC's DEBUG switch now creates executables with debug info on OSes other than AmigaOS4 (likely to be useful on AROS).

* Updated the examples StarsXY_ToySpaceshipSprite1.e & StarsZYX_ToySpaceshipSprite1.e to use the now-required addToGfx() method, and corrected the documention about creating a sub-class of cGfxDrawable.

Fixed a stupid error, which crept into the new PortablE release, which especially effected compiling on AmigaOS4. Please re-download!

Today (8th October 2012) I have released a new PortablE beta of my modernised AmigaE programming language. The changes include:

* AmigaOS4: Added some missing Commodities & Exec library functions.
* AmigaOS4: Memory allocations now follow the latest guidance. This should ensure that swap is fully utilised, which may be especially handy for the PortablE compiler itself.
* AROS: Got rid of harmless "superfluous cast" warnings that happened when automatically compiling a few modules.
* For the 'std/cPath' module, finally added 64-bit file support for AmigaOS4, and improved handling of files over 2GB for AROS, MorphOS & AmigaOS3.
* For the 'std/cGfx' module, it now uses real double-buffering for Full Screen (except on AROS). This can make animation smoother, and on AmigaOS3 it looks much much better.
* For the 'std/cGfx' module, added the ability to change window position & hide the mouse pointer.
* For the 'std/cGfx' module, fixed a couple of corrupted graphics bugs.
* For the 'std/cGfxSprites' module, made setData() & getData() easier to use, and added setDataPtr() & getDataPtr() for the old behaviour.
* For the 'std/cGui' module, windows can now be vertically resizable, and greatly improved the GUI layout code.
* For the 'std/cGui' module, added cGuiText, and changed how cGuiTextBox behaves. (The new cGuiText behaves similar to how cGuiTextBox used to, so switch to that if you only need to display one line of text.)
* For the 'std/cGui' module, the window's size & position can now be read & changed, just like cGfx.
* For the 'std/cGui' module, added some useful methods, and replaced cGuiWindow's setGhosted() with setBusy() & getBusy(). Also iconified windows now use the program's icon.
* For the 'std/cGui' module, fixed a performance issue, and also a crash which could occur when a window closed.
* For the 'std/cPath' module, split it into several smaller modules, which should allow simple programs to have smaller executables & slightly faster compilation times.
* For the 'std/cPath' module, replaced makePath() with getPath() & setPath().
* For the 'dos/dos' module, made BPTR a real pointer type, so that such variables are now auto-initialised to NIL like you would expect.
* For the 'devices/ahi' module, recreated this module for all targets, using the latest AHI header files. This helped fix various minor issues.
* For the 'dos' & 'icon' modules, BOOL return values (0,-1) were actually C boolean values (0,1). Fixed.
* Removed *Tags() procedures from the modules 'Picasso96API', 'dos', 'exec', 'graphics', 'icon' & 'identify'.
* Duplicate RAISE statements would cause a compilation crash instead of an error message. Also RAISE were incorrectly being inherited between modules in certain situations.
* Fixed many AmigaE code generation bugs & a few module problems, such that all the "std" examples can now be compiled using AmigaE rather than GCC.
* Fixed a few other bugs.

For the full list of changes & additional details, please see the documentation's History chapter.


Also note that I have updated & recompiled all the examples.

It may sound useless or too "cheap" but I wanted to tell that you're doing great! Good job!