In this new version I had the fortune to get my hands on a MIPS Creator CI20 board, thanks to Alexandru Voica from Imagination Technologies, so I spent some time on adding support for native calling conventions for MIPS processors on Linux and Android.
Adding support for the native calling conventions on Linux was easy enough, since I had already done similar work with ARM, and AngelScript already had support for MIPS on PSP. The ABI used by Linux (MIPS O32) is different than what is used by PSP (MIPS N32) so I still had to do a fair bit of reverse engineering of the ABI by reading assembler code and figure out how values are passed in and out of functions, but the original implementation by Manu Evans for PSP back in 2006 still helped a lot.
The Android support took more time. Not because of the ABI itself, which turned out to be identical to Linux, but because I had never worked with Android myself before. But, I decided it was time to sit down and learn the tools, so I went ahead and installed Android Studio, and Android NDK. It took some time to figure out how it works, but I managed to get the regression test suite to compile and upload it to the CI20. I didn't manage to figure out how to debug the native code on Android, but luckily I didn't have to as the ABI worked perfectly so it was mostly a matter of figuring out how to setup the configurations in as_config.h.
It's been fun learning about Android. I'm still a newbie in this world, but perhaps sometime in the future I'll start writing apps for Android too.
Of course, support for native calling conventions on MIPS is not the only improvement with this version. I've made some optimizations, especially scripts that do a lot of array access operations should hopefully notice a boost in performance. Loading pre-compiled byte-code should also be a lot faster, especially on mobile devices that don't have so much raw computing power.
dkrusu contributed a small language enhancement: for-loops can now have multiple increment expressions separated by commas.
Other than that, there is the usual load of bug fixes and minor improvements throughout. Refer to the changelist for the details.
Regards,
Andreas
