How deprecated is Neko now?

[dnewhall]

Hi, I actually use Neko in a few projects and have some patches to the core and standard library.

Why was it deprecated? Is this simply an instance of a new maintainer needing to be found? Or should I make a hard fork of Neko and add my features to that?

[tobil4sk]

Neko is deprecated because it was mostly superseded by Hashlink, so there is not much point in maintaining Neko anymore.

There was meant to be one more release (2.4.0) mostly for packaging reasons, but the current master branch includes a few bug fixes as well. Is it new features you're looking to add? Or bug fixes?

[dnewhall]

Primarily additions to the standard library, plus some typo and documentation fixes, and I think I modified some #defines and fixed some compiler warnings as well. There is one major change to the internals of the VM that I want to make, but haven't done yet. I have a todo/wishlist of features that I've picked at over time.

I never used Neko as a Haxe target, so I didn't know about HashLink. I have a Lisp compiler/interpreter I use for my projects that targets Neko that I've been working on finally packaging up for public release.

[tobil4sk]

Primarily additions to the standard library, plus some typo and documentation fixes, and I think I modified some #defines and fixed some compiler warnings as well. There is one major change to the internals of the VM that I want to make, but haven't done yet. I have a todo/wishlist of features that I've picked at over time.

Beyond the typo/documentation fixes, it is probably unlikely for new features or a large internal changes to be merged in.

Hashlink was made with the problems and limitations of Neko in mind, so it might be worth having a look at the details of Hashlink before changing the internals of Neko:

https://haxe.org/blog/hashlink-indepth/
https://haxe.org/blog/hashlink-in-depth-p2/

Although, I'm not sure how suitable Hashlink would be for a custom language.

[aleksmelnikov]

Hello.
Could you please clarify.

$haxe
Haxe Compiler 4.3.6 - (C)2005-2024 Haxe Foundation
Usage: 
...
  --interp                    interpret the program using internal macro system
  --run <module> [args...]    interpret a Haxe module with command line arguments

Do any of these features work through Neko?
Will these features remain (without Neko)?

[tobil4sk]

Do any of these features work through Neko?

No, both of these use haxe's eval target and have done for quite a while.

Neko is still a dependency of haxe because the haxelib binary is a neko program, and haxelib run [libname] uses neko unless a haxelib author specifically opts in to providing an eval script instead. haxelib run will eventually move to eval by default though hopefully after a bit of startup time optimisation.