Update on Dec 2021 and plans for 2022

Hey folks,
Work is proceeding well, although not perfect. Things have turned up since my last post, slowing things down some.

DarkEdif mobile SDK improvements

As you may remember from my last post, I've got an assembly programmer working on DarkEdif. He's produced assembly code for 3 out of 4 mobile CPU types - including simulator CPU types.

Namely, he's done x86_64 (64-bit simulator, some mobile phones), ARM64 (64-bit mobile phone), ARMv7 (32-bit mobile phone), and he's working on x86 (32-bit simulator).

The speed-ups will be for both Android and iOS, and will also be applied to their simulators. So now you can build for iOS and run your app in the iOS simulator and get it working, none of relying on deploying to your mobile device!

DarkEdif Windows XP

It's recently come to my attention that Visual Studio labels itself as supporting XP, but in practice is pretty inconsistent, resulting in me having to fire up an XP virtual machine and check OS function called is okay by hand. I've done some fixes in the SDK to make sure it builds XP+, but honestly not a huge amount needed changing - I will have to lock the SDK to a specific Visual Studio 2019 version or earlier, though.

I'm not too concerned about the percentage of users using Windows XP in the Western countries; it's well known that it's dated tech.
But it's very common for the Western world to be selling things at a premium to other countries, mostly from currency conversion rates. When you throw out your 200GB hard drive, you would rather sell it on for a few bucks than for zero, and a lot of people upgrading with only a few in Western world wanting it, leads to supply into other countries. And you can't run a new OS properly on old tech... so there'll be a lot of people in less developed countries using old tech and old OSes.

More to the point, if I say I have XP support, I want to have it. And if I decide to drop XP support later, I'll clearly label the point in the repository where you can get the last XP-compatible DarkEdif SDK.

DarkEdif Windows Vista+ fix soon

It's also come to my attention that not having XP support confuses the SDK - for some reason VS doesn't always select the Windows SDK to use, so I'll have to write in some code to do that.

Shouldn't take too long.

Next release

My next DarkEdif release will fix the XP and not-targeting-XP support.

Next update after will have the assembly code, or will have smart properties. Once both assembly and smart properties are done.

Lacewing Blue for mobile

I've had an iOS Lacewing bug reported, but it seems very rare - I'm working on eliminating it, but it seems to occur more frequently during debug. This commonly happens when there's a data race.
To give you an idea of how infrequent it happens, I've heard a report of one crash since I released my last iOS version weeks ago.

iOS is now in beta – everything works, just that one rare crash to iron out.

As for Android, I'm leaving it in beta too, because due to the shared codebase, I expect the iOS bug will occur there too. Both iOS and Android use a Unix-like interface, whereas Windows is its own thing, as far as Lacewing's code is concerned.

Future development

Because I wasn't working hard enough over last couple years, I put aside extra time this year for Patreon - I dedicated this whole year to working on Patreon work – losing around $60k of income from a client that would've hired me in the meantime – and I've achieved maybe half the projects I wanted done.
Regretfully, I can't financially afford another year, my focus will have to shift. Next year, I'll be travelling to America in March, and starting my plan to move there to be with my special someone.

I've only had the luxury of the year because my rent is very cheap where I am, actually a % of my income - so as I'll have a less forgiving landlord in America, I'm going to have to focus on my finances more again. But if someone in California wants to home me for a cheap rent in exchange for work on Fusion, I'm interested!

As for Fusion work, namely Patreon work, that will continue, at a reduced rate. Hopefully my new place will give me a lot more focus, as my environment is pretty noisy.

But if it gets to a point where I can't afford any time to work on Patreon, then I'll put my Patreon on pause - meaning you won't be paying me for that time period. I'll keep you informed if that happens, or if I'm going to resume it later

I am hoping to get DarkEdif improvements and Lacewing HTML5 out before any pause - and my function extension, as those are requested pretty heavily. (You can still vote on my task list, by the way!)

Thanks a lot to everyone who sponsors me. I wish I could do more, but at a loss of $60k a year and only a fraction of that in savings, it's just not possible. Your support and word-of-mouth is greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
~Phi