It's Official: Paladin 1.0!

At seven months old, Paladin certainly isn't going to win any age records, but it's nice to see how far it's come since last November when I first started it. It's been a couple of months since the RC6, but that's actually a good thing -- it's taken some time to find some of the bugs that have bitten the dust in this release. I'm also at the point where pretty much the only time I use BeIDE is to debug Paladin. All of my other work, such as the GUI designer, BeVexed, BeMines, and so on, have been done using Paladin. It feels great to have really scratched an itch that I've had for such a long time. I spent yesterday putting GCC4 fixes into the code for both development branches, and now the community has an IDE for both GCC flavors. I'll still be patching any bugs that might crop up, but it is feature complete and stable at this point.

For those of you that haven't played around with it, here are some of the differences between BeIDE and Paladin:

• Open source - you can pretty much do anything with its code that you want, except change the copyright on the original sources.
  
• Group non-code files -- notes, TODO lists, etc. -- in with your code for better organization
• Support for flex and bison out of the box
• More ways to execute your program, including logging debug output and setting run arguments
• Support debugging with gdb in Haiku
• Project files are in an open format
• Projects can be built from the command line
  

And this is just for the stable branch that came out today. Just so you know that I haven't been *just* fixing bugs, the development branch sports additional features, like makefile generation, better multithreaded build support, better integration of resource files, shell script support, and fast project backups. With the stable branch reaching 1.0, I'll be putting out periodic development builds so that people who like living on the cutting edge can get new features while others can get hold of a rock-solid build they can depend on. I'll be doing all of my development with this branch so that bugs can be found and fixed as features are added.


I've also added GCC4-only packages to BeBits so that anyone running it can conveniently get an alternative to just Pe and jam or make. I'm having problems uploading the new release to Haikuware, but I should have that resolved before long.

And for those of you about to code, we salute you. ;-)