A little over a year has past since the last release, and now another one is finally here. I've realized that a yearly release schedule is way too far between updates, so in 2019 I'll try to stick to at most 6 months between releases.
In version 2.33.0 the most notable changes are the following:
The asCALL_GENERIC calling convention is now behaving just like native calling conventions when it comes to object handles and reference counting. This means that the macros asFUNCTION, asMETHOD, etc are interchangeable with the WRAP_FN, WRAP_MFN, etc without any further code changes. Unfortunatly, those who already use asCALL_GENERIC heavily may have to make changes to adapt to the new code. To mitigate this, an engine property asEP_GENERIC_CALL_MODE has been introduced to allow the asCALL_GENERIC calling convention to work like before.
Value types can now also have garbage collector behaviours. This is important for those value types that can in turn hold references to reference types, specifically if the value types can also be a member of a script class or held in arrays or dictionaries. With the garbage collector behaviours the GC will be able to resolve the circular references involving the value types even though the value type itself isn't known to the GC.
The script language now has support for try/catch statements. With the addition of a couple of registered helper functions, the scripts can throw and catch exceptions, to treat different scenarios. While the syntax is not exactly like C++ it should be possible to do pretty much the same thing as in C++ and other similar languages. In addition to that the library interface now has the option to register a callback to translate C++ exceptions thrown from registered functions into script exceptions.
I've spent a little time working on the add-ons to make them more useful out-of-the-box. The asrun sample that uses most of the add-ons is now a pretty useful tool for scripting batch jobs. I'm even thinking of uploading pre-compiled versions of the tool for quick uses.
There are of course a lot of other smaller changes too, so check-out the change list for the complete set of changes.
Regards,
Andreas
