Much development has happened lately focused on what has always been the calling for Ecere: a Free Open Source Software status, as well as a greater facility to deploy across multiple platforms.

The next major release (0.44) was to reach these objectives, and I was hoping for it to be ready earlier this fall.

Unfortunately things moved a little slower than expected, but I still have a present for the enthusiasts on this Christmas day: a fully automated self building Ecere source package. It makes use of a much improved bootstrapping system (thanks Joey Adams for thinking it through) directly generated from the actual eC sources of the compiler.

Recent work was done to test and improve the support for platforms such as Mac OS X and big-endian systems (such as PowerPC, PlayStation 3 Cell processor, SPARC machines, …). I will call this a Source Draft, because it has not undergone much testing yet (although this SDK version is what makes up my own development tools). I will not provide binaries at this moment either. An official 0.44 release should follow up within the next few weeks. This draft release however marks the very first officially open source (under the revised BSD license) Ecere SDK release.

Contributions will be most welcome, and much efforts will be put in the coming weeks to increase the support for a community by establishing a clear roadmap, improving the web site, and coordinating interested developers. You can help us make this upcoming release the most stable Ecere SDK to date. Please note that any contribution will need to have its copyright renounced to Ecere, which will then relicense the code to everyone under the BSD license.

Despite being mainly a the first open source release, this new version features many improvements such as an automatic bootstrapping/build system, an SQLite driver for the Ecere Data Access system, additional IDE configurations enabling the integration of cross compilers, lots of bug fixes (most likely some new bugs as well) … and a tab control.

Download Ecere SDK 0.44 Draft 1 Sources

Merry Christmas, and I wish you all a wonderful year 2009, may you find internal peace and happiness in these fast pace and often challenging times.

For Windows:

Ecere SDK 0.43 for Windows – September 3, 2008 (36 MB)

If you already have MinGW installed on your system (or if you already have an earlier version of the Ecere SDK installed), you can chose the following significantly smaller package instead. Note that it doesn’t contain GDB and UPX either.
Ecere SDK 0.43 (No MinGW/GDB/UPX) for Windows – September 3, 2008 (7 MB)
If you chose this smaller package, make sure that the MinGW executables are either in your PATH or in the IDE’s File/Global Settings/Executables paths so that they can be found by the build system. Also, the IDE will be looking for a “make.exe” (rather than a mingw-make.exe).

For Linux:

Ecere SDK 0.43 for Linux (Generic binaries) – September 3, 2008

Please read the INSTALL file for instructions on how to install the generic tarball and for general notes on operation under Linux.

Ecere SDK 0.43 for Debian/Ubuntu – September 3, 2008
The samples will be located in /usr/ecere/samples/ .

Ecere SDK 0.43 for GoboLinux – September 3, 2008
(Add http://www.ecere.com/gobo/packages/MANIFEST to your official repository and run InstallPackage Ecere)
The samples will be located in /Programs/Ecere/0.43/samples/ .

Additions to the eC language

This release main highlights are class templates as well as standard collection (container) classes which have been added to the eC language. This functionality represents major work which had actually started in the the earlier releases as well, and finally is ready in this new version.

Templates

Class templates make possible generic/meta programming.

The approach of eC towards templates is unique in that it is completely dynamic. A template class is in fact declared the same way as (and no different from) a regular class, but specify “template parameters” to be parametrized. It is dynamic in that the class as it is can already deal with any parameters the class template could be used with, even if that parameter refers to for example a class not defined within the module of that template.

eC classes can exist within a shared library, or an eC source file and it can be used across multiple modules without the need for header files. The same is true for eC class templates, which do not require any additional compilation for use with different parameters. Only a single piece of code for the actual class templates and its functions exists, just like for any other eC class.

This “no recompilation” approach templates makes for smaller code size, but may scare some about its performance. However, in practice this should be minimal, since many optimizations are being applied, and more optimizations should come as we benchmark the eC dynamic templates approach. These new templates have worked and performed nothing but extremely well so far.

Classes can be parametrized using any number of three types of parameters: data types, expressions (e.g. specifying a constant value), as well as identifiers (Which can currently identifier a data member, but will be extended to properties and methods as well).

The templates are very powerful and support even complex cases with recursions as in the following example:

class A : B<A> { int a; }
class B<class T> { T test; }

Containers

The standard container classes included in this release are “typed” class templates to replace the previous “non typed” container classes (List, BinaryTree, and pseudo-template Array, which will be slowly phased out. In the meantime List has been renamed to “OldList”, Array to “OldArray”, and Link to “OldLink”). The new containers are all derived from a base “Container” class from which all containers should derive in order to benefit from generic iteration and new eC syntactic sugar. The provided default containers cover dynamic arrays through the new Array class, link lists through the new classes List and LinkList, associative arrays through the new class Map, as well as AVL trees (a particular type of self balancing binary tree) through the new classes AVLTree and CustomAVLTree. It is somewhat analogous to a subset of the Standard Template Library and its corresponding classes such as std::vector, std::list and std::map, though I believe eC’s approach is generally a lot more elegant.

The syntactic sugar for containers include the array notation, e.g. [ 1, 2, 3 ] to denote a container containing the three integers 1, 2 and 3. It also introduces a “foreach” syntax using the regular for keyword in a new way. The following will print all i in array which are greater than 1:

Array<int> array { [ 1, 2, 3 ] };
for(i : array; i > 1) PrintLn(i);

Notice how i (which takes the type of the array elements) does not need to be declared. Iterating can be done generically (not knowing what kind of container we’re dealing with) using the Iterator class, for example in the following manner:

Iterator<int> i { array };
while(i.Next()) PrintLn(i.data);

The indexing operator can also be used directly with the container classes. The following example can be used to count the occurrences of strings, assuming it is repeatedly called with “s” being each string to count. Notice how wordCounts is indexed with “s”.

Map<String, int> wordCounts { };
wordCounts[s]++;

The container classes can also be used to iterate through infinite collections, or through data contained outside the actual container class. Please look at the ContainersTest sample in the samples directory for additional examples, including iterating through the Fibonacci series.

Print / PrintLn

You might have noticed the PrintLn function which is now available to print to the standard output any data type followed by a newline. The equivalent function Print does the same without printing the new line. Furthermore, these functions can take any variable number of parameters which can be of different types, and it comes in various flavors (inside the File class, PrintBuf/PrintLnBuf, PrintString/PrintLnString). The following demonstrate the elegance of this new tool:

int a = 3, b = 4;
PrintLn(a, " + ", b, " = ", a + b);

 Other improvements

Another very enjoyable improvement is much improved syntax highlighting inside the IDE’s code editor, as well as some tweaks to the way the editor works which can be changed in the File/Global Settings dialog.

Many bug fixes and other issues were resolved inside the IDE, notably relating to the debugger integration. The debugging functionality should now be very useable under both Linux and Windows.

I’m also happy to provide new packages available for specific Linux distributions, such as Gobolinux (my personal favorite to which I switched my main development station – www.gobolinux.org) and Debian/Ubuntu.

Ecere Communicator as well as Acovel Media Player have been slightly updated for the new release, with some minor fixes along the way not justifying new versions. Here are the download links:

Acovel Media Player 0.01 for Windows
Acovel Media Player 0.01 for Linux

Ecere Communicator 0.02 for Windows
Ecere Communicator 0.02 for Linux

This release features major bug fixes and improvements to the EDA library (Ecere Data Access), support for executables and DLLs compression through UPX, an improved EditBox Undo buffer, important optimizations to the region updating engine, as well as a bunch of other bug fixes and improvements.

Download Ecere SDK 0.42.1 for Windows – June 11, 2008 (obsolete)

Download Ecere SDK 0.42.1 for Linux – June 11, 2008  (obsolete)

I’ve been wanting to add a few features to the Ecere Fractals explorer (a sample project in the SDK) ever since I coded it up years ago. I finally took some time to work on it! Improvements include support for smooth coloring; a brand new gradient editor; the option to save with or without computed data; export to image files with bilinear filtering; and some new interesting presets. The new version is included in the SDK and here are some links to pre-built executables and source code:

Download Ecere Fractals Explorer for Windows / Linux / Source

Here is a screenshot of the new version:

and some of my new creations:

It brings a long overdue undo/redo buffer to the IDE’s code editor, improved X support, improvements to the IDE and numerous bug fixes.

The new installer for Windows comes with a GCC 4.3 alpha MinGW and should install and compile on Windows Vista with much less difficulty than last release.

The Ecere Database Access system (libEDA.so / EDA.dll) is included in this release, with two new samples making use of it: MedDB and EDATest. Please take a look at this wiki page for a quick walk through (draft) of using EDA and get in touch with me further assistance.

You will also notice a new libec.so / ec.dll which holds the compiler functionality. It is not required by applications built with the SDK, but shared by the IDE and compilation tools (you will notice they shrank in size).

The latest version of the programmer’s guide (a work in progress) is bundled as a PDF in a documentation folder as well.

Please register on the Mantis bug tracker to report any problem with this release.

Ecere SDK 0.42 for Windows – May 15, 2008

Ecere SDK 0.42 for Linux – May 15, 2008

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.11 for Windows

This is mainly a patch release to correct the performance issue.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.11 for Linux

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.11 for Mac OS X

Here is the first attempt at supporting Mac OS X. For now the interface & graphics driver run on X11. Support for a more native solution such as Carbon is planned for the future, but it is not a priority for the moment. This should allow Mac folks to give the Ecere SDK a try, and hopefully attract contributors who would like to improve Mac support.

There are a few glitches with Ecere on X on Mac. To get anywhere you will most likely need the X.org server rather than the old XFree86. X.org comes by default with Leopard, but for those still on Tiger, here is where you can obtain prebuilt binaries for it. Also take a look at this page. You will also need the same dependencies as for Ecere on Linux, such as libjpeg, libpng, freetype, fontconfig, etc., some of which might not be already installed on your system. Some other problems seem to be caused by the interaction with quartz-wm (another window manager might work better). For some reason, new windows always want to be positioned at the top-middle position of the desktop. I had to patch the X driver to get around this problem, but it still causes some annoying repositioning of the windows. Sadly, the overall performance especially with text seems a lot slower for me than on Linux/X.org 7.3. I am not sure what is making XRender so much slower on my Mac. On my system the IDE has a little trouble dialoguing with the installed GDB 6.1 which prevents the integrated debugger to function. It might work on a more recent version of GDB.

Please give me feedback on how Ecere on Mac works out for you in the comments.

A few important improvements were also made to the X driver. Windows can now be closed through the window manager. Repositioning windows from the Window manager doesn’t confuse their positions anymore. 15/16 bit displays are now supported.

I found that the Xrender API documentation is very difficult to find, and quite incomplete. Here is where the latest Xrender protocol is at and here is a copy of Xrender library API documentation. Trying to get 16 bit working, the XRenderFindFormat function was particularly difficult, but I learned that the count parameter which the above documentation isn’t so clear about had to be 0. The color masks should also not be shifted.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.10 for Windows
Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.10 for Linux
Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.10 for Mac OS X

After all this struggle to get SCIM working, I could finally implement the international input support.

Ecere Communicator now includes the new runtime library and supports international input as well.

The Linux SDK now also properly supports X keysyms to follow the correct keyboard layout.

I believe the X clipboard operations should be fixed for good this time. (I tested and was able to copy to and from FireFox and between two Ecere IDEs.)

The X bitmap rendering features some additional support.

Two small samples were added, a transparent clock, and a utility to take a screen shot of the X desktop.

A smal fix was made to desktop-level transparent windows using OpenGL. The IDE and Debugger had some minor improvements done as well.

An issue was resolved on Windows, whereas internal resources could not be accessed when a executable was inside a path containing non-ASCII characters. The last installer itself would not work when ran from such a path.

With the Windows taskbar autohiding, the Ecere applications do not resize anymore (it was causing a “jumping” effect) .

The runtime now prompts for reestablishing Windows network connections.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.9 for: Windows or Linux

Download Ecere Communicator 0.02 for Linux

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the SDK for both Windows & Linux, supporting Unicode and all recent improvements which have been going on in the last 3 months. (The Windows SDK was somewhat outdated, from August). The Linux version features a number of bug fixes and improvements. Quite a few samples have been added as well to showcase the power of the SDK, all released under the BSD license.

Ecere Communicator is now available for Linux. It is an instant messaging client under development supporting AIM/ICQ, MSN and Jabber/XMPP protocols. Basic messaging and contact list functionality (sorry, cannot add contacts yet) are fully working.

A very tiny sample to take a screen shot of the X desktop has been included (code follows) as I’ve found this to be a tedious task to do on my self-built Ecere Linux distribution. It proved itself especially useful while trying to take the attached screen shot with xcompmgr running, somehow the usual xwd, xwdtopnm, pnmtopng utilities didn’t know what to do with the extra alpha channel.

import "ecere"
class ShotApp : GuiApplication
{
   Window window { };
   bool Init()
   {
      Bitmap bitmap { };
      desktop.Grab(bitmap, null, false);
      bitmap.Save("shot00.png", null, null);
      delete bitmap;
      window.Destroy(0);
      return true;
   }
}

I would like to emphasize the very small footprint of the Ecere SDK (libecere.so is all an application needs to run and is only 1.5 MB) and small number of dependencies required to use it. With full functionality, Ecere only requires standard graphic formats, X, GL and core system libraries. It aims to be an alternative to GTK, Qt, GNOME, KDE and therefore doesn’t require any of those. If you ever tried to build them for your LFS (Linux From Scratch), you know how heavy, dependent and long to compile they are. Yet, Ecere already provides a very appealing level of comparable functionality and is still far from what it intends to become.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.7 for: Windows or Linux (obsolete)

Download Ecere Communicator for: Windows or Linux

Here is a screen shot of them in action:

The Linux Ecere SDK now supports alpha blending window contents through the “bool alphaBlend” property of the window class. When set to true, the window has its own alpha channel which a proper composite manager such as xcompmgr will happily use to make parts of the window translucent or completely transparent. The SDK will also automatically redefine the input region through the XShape extension so that clicks in transparent areas will click through on the underneath windows.

To render non opaque contents on the window, use a value smaller than 255 for the surface’s foreground and background while calling drawing methods (Proper support through both XRender and OpenGL in this release). You can also use a value between 0 and 1.0 (exclusively) for the window’s opacity to automatically have a translucent background drawn for you.

A few fixes were also done to the X OpenGL driver and it should now properly run anti-aliased if possible. Here is a binary version of Chess for those who do not yet wish to install the SDK.

Feel free to let me know if you get these running nicely on your system, and I’ll appreciate if you send me nice screen shots of those in action on your own favorite Linux desktop environment. The above screenshot is lacking hiragana characters on the cube as a CJK enabled Unicode font was not found by fontconfig. Ensure you have one of those (see previous post) if you wish to see them.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.5 for Linux (obsolete)

Download Ecere Chess for Linux

Download Windowless Hiragana Cube and Color Spheres for Linux