December 2023 Release

[mkellner]

This release contains improvements to the Moddable SDK made between November 6, 2023 and November 30, 2023.

Highlights of this release include:

• New animated Piu round-balls example for circular displays
• New circular display simulator (WaveShare Pico RP2040)
• Support for M5Dial and M5Stamp S3 devices
• LittleFS now available on Raspberry Pi Pico

Release Details

• Devices
  • ESP32 Family
    • Add support for M5Dial device (contributed by @stc1988)
    • Add support for M5Stamp S3 device (contributed by @stc1988)
    • Watchdog timer working again on ESP32 Family devices. Was temporarily broken by upgrade to ESP-IDF 5. (Contributed by @tve)
  • Raspberry Pi Pico
    • LittleFS is now available on Raspberry Pi Pico (requested by @ArashMotamedi, implemented by @mkellner)
  • nRF52
    • Latest nRF52 bootloader binary with option to update firmware using BLE
• Modules
  • ECMA-419
    • ECMA-419 Serial implementations all default the format to "buffer". This was previously "number" on some platforms. Tracks an update to ECMA-419. fix(tc53): serial format defaults to number EcmaTC53/spec#41 (Reported by @HipsterBrown). Projects that rely on the default format being "number" need to be updated.
    • ECMA-419 HTTP Client consistently updates writable count to fix edge case write failures with TLS. (reported by @sburel)
    • ECMA-419 GT911 touch driver implements get configuration to allow Piu to use its interrupt
    • MQTT.js module implementation now uses URL module
    • ECMA-419 WebSocket module implementation now uses URL module
    • ESP32 family devices running a debug build now reserve the Serial transmit and receive pins used for debugging. If a script attempts to use these pins, it generates an exception. Inspired by report Crash on IO Serial constructor #1226 by @ralphwetzel.
  • ElevenLabs text-to-speech supports additional parameters (contributed by @stc1988)
• XS
  • Fix typeof operator for host (native) functions to return "function"
  • Module loader now only calls resolve hook once for each unique module specifier in a Compartment
  • Module loader wasn't always decrementing loaded module count, leading to preposterous loaded module count
  • Fix crash in XS debugging support when launching a second time (very rare).
• Examples
  • New Piu round-balls example for circular displays -- balls bounce of the edges of a circle
  • Fix capitalization of GIF and QRCode paths in Moddable Four First run app to build on case-sensitive file systems
  • httpserverputfile example now uses config.file.root for portability. (Reported by @kallistisoft) File not found error when creating a new file while running /examples/network/http/httpserverputfile #1246
  • Giphy app only opens Flash module instance once. This allows it to work on ESP-IDF 5 which no longer supports memory mapping the same region multiple times. (reported by @stc1988) contributed/giphy app failed to launch #1258.
• Instrumentation
  • Fix instrumentation memory leak when root VM allocated more than once
  • Instrument additional cases of floating point math in add, subtract, and multiply
• Tools
  • mcrun supports -t build option to build mod without deploying or running
  • New "WaveShare Pico RP2040" device simulator provides round screen (for use with piu/round-balls example)
  • ESP32 makefile on macOS & Linux supports experimental -t buildArchive to build the archive with Moddable SDK objects but not build and link the ESP-IDF host (for specialized scenarios like building the Moddable SDK into an ESP-IDF application)
  • XS Linker fixes "0" and "@" hash value conflicted? #1209 again ("0" and "@" confusion). This original fix was broken when fixing import failed in mod #1232. Both "0" and "@" hash value conflicted? #1209 and import failed in mod #1232 are now fixed. Thanks to @linfan68 for re-reporting.
• Tests
  • Add warning if Resource slice test on fails on Windows because Moddable SDK was checked out with Windows line endings instead of Unix line endings
• Documentation
  • XS in C documentation updated with high-level introduction to Host Object, Host Data, and Host Chunk. (contributed by @tve based on text from @phoddie)
  • Repository root readme notes that XS now supports ECMAScript 2023

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This discussion was created from the release December 2023 Release.