Haxe 4.0.0-preview.5

Release Notes

Dear Community,

On behalf of the Haxe Foundation, we are proud to announce the official release of the Haxe 4.0.0-preview.5! It is available along with the changelog at https://haxe.org/download.

As a preview release, it should not be considered stable. However, we appreciate anyone testing this version which will help us with the real Haxe 4 release. Please report any issues here:

https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/issues

Thank you very much for your help!

Change Log

2018-10-13: 4.0.0-preview.5

New features:

• all : support Unicode strings properly on all targets
• all : support for (key => value in e) syntax for key-value iterators
• all : added keyValueIterator to Map and its implementations
• all : support loop-unrolling on for (i in 0...5) (#7365)
• all : added support for write-mode @:op(a.b)
• all : support inline call() and inline new expressions (#7425)
• all : support @:using on type declarations (#7462)
• all : support XML literal strings but require them to be macro-processed (#7438)
• all : allow enum values without arguments as default function argument values (#7439)
• lua : add -D lua-vanilla, which emits code with reduced functionality but no additional lib dependencies

General improvements and optimizations:

• all : [breaking] reserved operator and overload as keywords (#7413)
• all : made final on structure fields invariant (#7039)
• all : [breaking] disallowed static variables that have no type-hint and expression (#6440)
• all : added display/typeDefinition to display protocol (#7266)
• all : fixed various display-related problems
• all : made parser in display mode much more tolerant
• all : allowed assigning [] where Map is expected (#7426)
• all : unified various parts of the String API across all targets
• php : Optimized haxe.ds.Vector (VectorData is not Array anymore)
• php : Optimized Map.copy() and Array.copy()
• php : Optimized iterators of Map and native arrays.
• php : Support native PHP generators. See php.Syntax.yield() and php.Generator
• js : updated HTML externs
• eval : improved object prototype field handling (#7393)
• eval : optimized int switches (#7481)
• eval : improved IntMap and StringMap performance
• eval : improved performance of instance calls

Removals:

• all : disallowed get_x/set_x property syntax, use get/set instead (#4699)
• all : disallowed default values on interface variables (#4087)
• all : disallowed implements Dynamic on non-extern classes (#6191)
• all : warn about expressions in extern non-inline fields (#5898)
• all : removed -D use-rtti-doc, always store documentation instead (#7493)
• all : disallowed macro-in-macro calls (#7496)
• js : removed jQuery and swfobject externs (#7494)

Bugfixes:

• all : fix GC compacting too often in server mode
• all : [breaking] function () { }(e) is no longer parsed as a call (#5854)
• all : fixed various minor inlining issues
• all : disallowed return null from Void-functions (#7198)
• all : fixed various pattern matching problems
• all : fixed compiler hang in display mode (#7236)
• all : fixed the XML printer trimming CDATA content (#7454)
• all : fixed invalid visibility unification with statics (#7527)
• php : Escape $ in field names of anonymous objects (#7230)
• php : Generate switch as if...else if...else... to avoid loose comparison (#7257)
• cs : fixed bad evaluation order in structures (#7531)
• eval : fixed various problems with the debugger
• eval : fixed Vector.fromArrayCopy (#7492)
• eval : fixed bad string conversions on invalid + operations

Standard Library:

• all : [breaking] made Lambda functions return Array instead of List (#7097)
• all : added haxe.iterators package
• all : improved StringTools.lpad/rpad/htmlEscape implementation