Wow, it's been 6 long months since the last release. Never before during the 13 years that I've been working on AngelScript has it been this far between two releases.
Naturally, with such a long period, the number of changes that have been made are also larger than anytime before. As this is a major release, there is also interface breaking changes. Not to worry though the changes are for the better, and I'm certain that it shouldn't take much work for users to upgrade to the new version.
The most significant change to the interface is that the asIObjectType has been removed. Instead the new asITypeInfo has been introduced. asITypeInfo has all the methods that asIObjectType had before to inspect object types, and it also has new methods to inspect enums, typedefs, and funcdefs. With this change I've unified the way that type information can be handled by the application, which I hope should be welcome change.
Of course, some methods on the other interfaces, e.g. asIScriptEngine, asIScriptContext, asIScriptModule, etc, have been changed to reflect the move from asIObjectType to asITypeInfo, but developers ought to feel right at home with the changes.
These changes to the application interface has also triggered a rather extensive refactoring of the code within the library, so that was another reason for the long period since the last release.
Some other enhancements that also made it in to this release are:
- support for storing an auxiliary pointer with functions registered using asCALL_GENERIC
- included engine property asEP_ALLOW_UNICODE_IDENTIFIERS for those who do not like the restriction of using only English alphabet in the scripts
- funcdefs can now be registered/declared as members of classes
- included a simple datetime script add-on for telling the time
- added a method getInput in asrun to allow it to take input from the user
I never intended to make AngelScript a stand-alone scripting language, but I've been adding some functionality to the asrun sample every once in a while, and it is has now reached a stage where it can actually be used to script some tasks that I would normally use other script languages for. For example, I now use asrun to prepare the SDK package for the release. It actually feels quite cool to see this work out so well despite it not being the intended use for the library.
Regards,
Andreas
