Progress Report #10 – Filling in Gaps

New changes this week in Copper fill in some of the gaps that show up when trying to use Copper for real-world projects. The first of these is the indication of the support of multiple interfaces, which solves the dilemma of distinguishing between polymorphic objects turned into Copper objects. The second is the addition of a system function that enables the sharing of user-created function bodies.

In other notes, the string_map extension received a bug fix for not correctly returning when “exit” was called in the middle of the callback function it was given.

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Progress Report #9

After some critical debugging of the recently changed runFunctionObject() (used for callbacks), I decided to add a new boolean function in the spirit of doing things fast and efficiently: xall(). This function is the equivalent of any(all(…), nall(…)) where “…” represents the same arguments. Using xall() is much less error prone (since you only need to type the argument names once) and much faster because it’s all on the C++ side.

In other news…

foreign.run(anytime)

Up to this point, the foreign function system did not allow using callbacks via Engine::runFunctionObject() until after Engine::execute() or Engine::run() (which calls Engine::execute()) had completed. My recent update changes that and makes recursive execution of opcodes easier.

FFIServices::morph()

For the second time, I’m changing the foreign function interface. (Actually, I already did.) It’s a rather sudden announcement, but since no one else besides me is using the language that I know of, I can get away with things like this.

log(improvements)

One of the features I had been meaning to get around to for some time was improvements to the logging. The original system had one enum value per error. It gets quite tedious pretty quickly when you have to write out redundant messages with only a single word changed. Since it would be nice to have the messages be localized (i.e. translated into different languages), I used an enum, but obviously, I needed to shorten the process.

The result of my long evening of work was a rewrite of part of the logging system that resulting in an easily extensible interface for which I created pretty print logging (which you can see in the feature image of this post).

Introducing Cupric Bridge

Recently, I utilized the serialization interface in Irrlicht to allow Copper to create GUIs. The code for this is part of my project “Cupric Bridge”. Also in this project are bindings that allow for callbacks from different types of GUI elements.

Bug Fixes (v 6-0.51)

Branch 6, version 0.51 has a couple of important bug fixes.

An old bug in Copper that had gone under the radar for a while: The system functions “all” and “any” had been flipped in functionality. Each one was doing the other’s job. The bug was probably introduced during a rewrite of those functions.

CallbackWrapper was also fixed. The Copper callback is now disowned in the destructor so its lifetime is now correctly tied to the CallbackWrapper.