ThinBASIC 1.8.0.0 is now available in form of stable release.
What is new since latest stable from the past year?
Surprise
The first thing you may notice right after installation is new thinTutorial. It is application developed in ThinBASIC, combining both traditional GUI and new WebBrowser component, which provides you with the introduction to the language. The tutorials recently present are community effort, co-edited by many members, and you can expect the repertoir of covered topics will grow in the future.
The IDE
The second thing is completely re-coded IDE, more stable, and more customizable than before. There has been lot of effort put to making the thinAir more pleasant to use, so you got brand new codebrowser for easy code navigation. What does it mean? All the opened files have their functions and subs listed there, just click and cursor navigates to appropriate procedure. But that is not all - you can do the same to explore include files and even check the user defined types definitions.
If you follow appropriate rules for making comments in the code, the important comments, like TODO or places where you put comment underlining the text as suggestion for optimization or testing are also conveniently placed in the code browser.
But that is not all for the IDE - the syntax highlighting is brand new, fully customizable using also new, easy to navigate thinAir Options dialog. Choose font, choose color to anything you find suiting your needs.
thinDebug, the debugger has been significantly enhanced as well. You can inspect variables on the fly. Not just simple variables, but you can watch immediately also array contents in comfortable grid control and check out User Defined Types as well.
What is new in the language itself?
Where to start? The stability and parsing speed has been further improved. Lot of effort has been put into intensive testing, and so far it seems to pay off.
The most used modules got updated intensively. UI module functions for handling controls such as ListView, ScrollBars, Grid control or Canvas provide more power now. The WebBrowser control is brand new and as the name suggests, it serves for embedding HTML rendering into your programs.
TBGL module for hardware accelerated graphics has been updated with completely new sprite system with over 100 dedicated functions, material handling and GBuffers - highly optimized method for definition and rendering of primitives. The rendering of text in both 2D and 3D mode can take advantage of new syntax, bringing further speed improvements.
If you are OpenGL coder, you might know the management of OpenGL states is sometimes very tiring, switching them on and off, one by one... TBGL is not just OpenGL wrapper, so it provides more comfortable ways to manage states. Do you want to enable multiple states at once, just for specific part of code? No problem. You can also isolate parts of code from effect of certain states safely now.
If you care what your users think about your "good habits", you will appreciate new way of rendering in discrete time intervals, resulting in very low CPU usage.
What about user defined geometry "objects", read about them in dedicated article (PDF).
Charles Pegge again proves he is the magician of code, and his Oxygen module for JIT compilation of BASIC and Assembly code has been improved drastically, providing users with such a features as object oriented programming techniques.
The boosting of performance can be achieved thanks to porting OpenCL cutting edge GPGPU technology to thinBasic as well. Headers at your service, along with code generator to speed up the development.
ThinBASIC, interpreter with JIT module and now access to GPGPU acceleration? Why not, various users have various needs, and we are happy to help opening new possibilities.
Complete list of changes can be found at this link:
http://www.thinbasic.com/public/prod...on_1_8_0_0.htm
So ... see next version in 2011?
Ha! Not at all! There is already new version in the works, which will bring further improvements in the modules, IDE and will make happy especially the programmers of ThinBASIC extension module DLLs.
Thanks for taking time to read this report and stay tuned!
Grab your copy of ThinBASIC right now at thinBasic web site or in any mirror servers.
http://www.thinbasic.com/index.php?o...tegory&catid=1
ThinBASIC team
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