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New Releases!

Finally, I’ve managed to make a few more releases. Namely, HXCPP 2.06 and NME 2.0.
HXCPP can be downloaded via “haxelib”, and works with the new 2.06 version of haxe. This release contains many bug fixes and optimizations. Also, when you compile with the -debug flag, you can get additional null checks and stack dumps.
NME 2 is a complete rewrite from the ground up. Most of the logic has been moved from neash to the c++ code for optimization reasons.
For NME developers this only means a couple of things:

  • You use –remap flash=nme instead of –remap flash=neash
  • The “boot” code has changed, so you will need to follow the main line from one of the samples.
  • Improved performance!

I updated my Xcode SDK, which caused a bunch of link errors linking for the simulator with the NME library. It seems Apple have changed the “ABI” for objc (basically, broke binary compatibility). So I must choose pre 4.0, post 4.0 or both. I think I am going to require NME iphone simulator users to have the latest SDK – unless there are any objections?

iPhone Xcode Template

I finally got around to making an Xcode template for haxe compiling. Try it out and let me know if it works. It’s my first one, so I’m open to ideas for improving it.

To use the template, first extract it to your developer template area, eg: /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/Project Templates/Application.
Then when you create an new Xcode project, this template should show up. You should be able to build for the simulator.

To build for a real device, you will need to go though the official Apple developer program, and get yourself signed up. Then you need to get your certificates in order, and finally edit the “plist” file in the Resources folder and change the company URL to match the one you used in your certificates.

You can edit Main.hx code in the “haxe/src” directory, but you will probably want to locate your haxe source tree outside your project area, since we are multi-platform developers an do not want to tie ourselves to Xcode. To do this, you can edit the class path in the Build.xml file, and change the boot code in IPhoneMain.hx. It is done this way so the haxe-generated library always has the same name. If all else fails, you can have a look in the makefile, which is set up to allow building debug and release versions for iphoneos and simulator without having to change other project settings.

Let me know if you have any luck.

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HXCPP 0.3 Released

I have put together a new version of hxcpp, the c++ backend for haxe. New features include improved coverage of language features. All the unit tests except remoting pass now. I have also cleaned up the ocaml code a bit and improved the output consistency. Still a bit to do here, but not that much.

The code now contains a dependency system that allows for incremental compiling, greatly improving the speed.

Dlls are now all in one directory – by adding this to the exe path no dll copying should be required. This still needs a little thought :- I tried to delay load the dll, thereby giving greater control over locating it, but it seems the rtti system brings the dll in before I can change the load path. Apart from this, most of the 0.1 TODO list is finished. There are still a few little language features required – such as “break” from within a return block but it’s 99% there, and the external libraries are pretty much untested.

I have also hijacked the neko code to provide OS libraries. This means that I had to allow “neko” class paths in the cpp target – this seems a little odd – I will have to think about a solution here.

Strings are implemented with wchar_t, rather than utf8 bytes, so some neko functions that took “string” actually take “byte array” in cpp. On the plus side, multi-byte characters are “native” in the c++ target.

The source and demos are in hxcpp-03.zip.