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 😉
Where is the wiki?
@vam
Currently the wiki is on googlecode, and quite empty
http://code.google.com/p/dwscript/w/list
I have no issue with moving to another wiki or wiki host if someone wants to take over that aspect, as long as the wiki contents can be backed up and back ups are easy to access/restore. The GoogleCode wiki is rather bare-bones…
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.