What’s coming next…

By Eric Grange / November 8, 2011

There are several things planned and underway for the next DWScript version, this post will serve as a roadmap of sorts.

Of course, there is a wealth of other changes (minor or not) that aren’t mentioned there, but will likely happen.

What’s already happening

  • IDE Dialog : thanks to Brian Frost.
    • comes with a  documentation.
    • edit scripts from within an application.
    • supports (fledgling) code proposals.
    • run a script under the debugger.
    • breakpoints & stepping.
    • watches.
    • local variables view, call stack.
    • and more!
  • FreePascal port : thanks to alexvins.
    • for details and progress, see the FPC wiki.
    • some changes in 2.2 were already introduced to reduce the distance.

Planned language features:

The overall goal is to meet Delphi features, and hopefully bypass it by introducing language elements from Prism or FreePascal, where they makes sense.

  • method overloading
  • “set of” (likely will be generalized to a set of any type)
  • generics or templates (I’m still undecided, maybe both if I can’t decide ;-))
  • anonymous methods (aka closures)

Planned tools and architectural features

  • unit test coverage of 95% overall, with all core units at 100%.
  • static shared units (compile-time and memory usage optimization).
  • incremental internal changes towards strong typing & away from variants.
  • extended and improved IDE support tools.
  • audits & static analysis tools.
  • further RTTI interfacing improvements.

How can I help?

The best way is probably to volunteer!

If you don’t feel like tackling complex aspects, there are many peripheral tasks where you can make a difference:

  • report bugs in the Issue Tracker
  • add  simple DWScript samples at Rosetta Code
  • contribute graphics: component icons (current ones are old and ugly), a new logo, etc.
  • design or report about more complex or real-world usage cases for DWScript
  • contribute tutorials, documentation, even a single wiki page on a single function or language feature can help
  • contribute IDE support tools or components
  • make a donation 😉

And DWScript being Object Pascal-rooted, merely using it in your applications will raise Object Pascal awareness and contribute in a small bit to Pascal staying afloat and popular 😉

 

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3 thoughts on “What’s coming next…”

  3. About the documentation, it should better not be a word document directly, but more likely using a documentation generation tool.
    Perhaps our Open Source http://synopse.info/fossil/wiki?name=SynProject tool may be useful.
    It is able to create formatted Word documents from a text file (much more git-friendly), uses an easy wiki-like syntax for its content, and has already object pascal highlighting included.
    It may also be used to document the implementation part of DWS, not only high-level end-user documentation.

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