0.8 Release

Started by Zetal, 27 March 2018, 17:15:31

Zetal

Hello again! A friend and I have been using TGUI for a project for a few months now. Some features that we'd like are available in the versions that have been released since we started work, but we weren't sure if it would be good to update just yet. Do you know when 0.8 will hit stable release, or if it will be worth waiting to update to that, or should we update now?

Thanks!

texus

I'm very biased in this because I always want to recommend using the very latest version simply because it has a lot of improvements (and because 0.7 feels old to me, from my perspective it is something from 2 years ago as I started working on 0.8-dev soon after the release of 0.7.0). But the downside of using 0.8 is that you will have to update your code when I make changes (e.g. I'm currently replacing show() and hide() functions with setVisible(bool), so you would have to update these calls after I release the changes). So you should have to decide for yourself.

The 0.8-alpha release is expected relatively soon (it could easily take more than a few weeks with my current progress though) and this release kind of indicates that the largest rewrites are done, which is actually already the case. There are no more planned changes that would affect the entire codebase, just smaller rewrites like the show/hide change, changing the way the user can resize a ChildWindow, etc.
Progress is going slowly, so I wouldn't wait for the final 0.8.0 release, it may still be many months away.

I can't guarantee that there won't be any large changes anymore though as I don't have a todo list for things that are going to happen after 0.8-alpha has been released. But I actually want to get 0.8 ready as quickly as possible, I don't want to spend another 2 years developing it (as it would mean that in e.g. 1.5 years from now there would still be people downloading the older 0.7 release).

Bug-wise, 0.8-dev should be just as stable as 0.7. There might be some more bugs in the new parts simply because it has been used less, but this is partially compensated with many more unit tests in 0.8. Plus any known bug is fixed practically immediately anyway in either version.