Monkey 2 V1.0.0 now available!

Hi,

It’s been a while coming, but monkey 2 v1.0.0 is now up at github and available as a prebuilt binary (Windows only sorry) from the new files page here:  http://monkey2.monkey-x.com/monkey2-files/!

Pleae note that although this is a ‘version 1 release’ it is by no means the end of anything. It’s really just a snapshot of where things stand, but with the added security of knowing that I’m not gonna ‘break’ anything any time soon (some stuff *will* inevitably be deprecated over time though). To this end, quite a bit of stuff I’m not too sure about has been left out of the docs. Feel free to play around with anything – and most of it will likely stay in some form or another – but generally speaking, only the stuff that is docced is guaranteed to keep working the way it does.

Monkey2 now also includes Ted2 – a minimal ‘IDE’ designed mainly so users have *something* to build monkey 2 apps with, and on any platform they can build monkey 2 for. If you find Ted2 a touch *too* minimal, you can still use  Ted from monkey1, or perhaps try out weibow’s Sublime text 3 package – more info here:  http://monkey2.monkey-x.com/forums/topic/sublime-text-3-language-file-and-snippets/. I’m sure more add-ons for other editors will happen over time too.

I do plan to continue development of Ted2 – there’s a pretty cool potential gui module lurking in there, and I still love the idea of being able to host any future potential ‘maplet2’ style tools in a common IDE.  But I did probably bite off a bit more than I could chew taking on a GUI/IDE, given I’m also responsible for the language, modules, documentation, website etc. Yet…I still like the fact that mx2 is (finally) a ‘self contained’ product, and you can just download it and use it without any stuffing around!

Ted2 also includes a simple debugger, along the lines of the b3d, bmx and mx1 debuggers. Again, nothing too flash – there’s ‘pause’, ‘step’, ‘step-in’ and ‘step-out’ (although you still need to manually add DebugStop’s to the code, and no debugging of globals yet sorry) but it’s still a huge improvement on ‘print’ style debugging (although that’s often useful!). I do think the ultimate solution to a debugger is probably a ‘gdb parser’ style thing, but that’s a relatively big job that I’m not up to undertaking just yet. There’s also plenty I can improve on with the current system anyway.

Finally, the docs are still a little rough around the edges. I will keep hacking away at them, but there’s still a fair bit to do and I didn’t want to hold up a ‘release version’ release any longer.

I’ll be making another post soon concerning ‘what’s next’ (getting mx2 working on emscripten/android/ios are high priority though) but right now I’m off for a long relaxing bath!

Bye,
Mark