New Espruino IDE

I've just pushed out a new IDE (0.68.5) - across Chrome, Native, Website and NPM.

There are a few nice improvements:

• There's a new intro screen which looks a bit better, and which will show you up to date news.
  
• If a device is running new firmware (cutting edge, or 1v96 when released) then it'll report back which modules are included in it - and these will be used when figuring out which new modules to get off the internet.
  
• The longstanding issue with Blockly blocks being misshapen on first startup is now fixed, and you can choose which blocks are shown in settings with a nicer UI.
  
• The Assembler now supports templated strings, so you can do one big multiline blob of assembly
  
• The Assembler itself supports a few more operations and has one or two ops fixed
  
• The compiler service for compiled functions has had a whole bunch of improvements, and is now available for Nordic devices (like Puck.js) with 1v96 (or cutting edge) firmware as well - just right now not through the website-based IDE until the compiler service gets upgraded to HTTPS.
  
  

Leaving the best till last:

You can now dynamically add C functions into Espruino, as part of JS code

As a totally random example, here's a function to calculate Fibonacci numbers, written in C, JavaScript, and compiled JavaScript:

var c = E.compiledC(`
// int fibo(int)

int fibo(int n){
 if(n <= 1){
  return n;
 }
 int fibo = 1;
 int fiboPrev = 1;
 for(int i = 2; i < n; ++i){
  int temp = fibo;
  fibo += fiboPrev;
  fiboPrev = temp;
 }
 return fibo;
}
`);


function fibo(n){
 if(n <= 1){
  return n;
 }
 var fibo = 1;
 var fiboPrev = 1;
 for(var i = 2; i < n; ++i){
  var temp = fibo;
  fibo += fiboPrev;
  fiboPrev = temp;
 }
 return fibo;
}

function compiled_fibo(n){
  "compiled";
 if(n <= 1){
  return n;
 }
 var fibo = 1;
 var fiboPrev = 1;
 for(var i = 2; i < n; ++i){
  var temp = fibo;
  fibo += fiboPrev;
  fiboPrev = temp;
 }
 return fibo;
}

This is still extremely early days, so expect some things not to work. However importantly you can upload multiple C functions that can interact... You just put the prototype (as used for the Assembler) for each function you want to export at the top:

var c = E.compiledC(`
// void press(bool)
// int get()

int data;

void press(bool state){
  data++;
}

int get() {
 int r = data;
 data = 0;
 return r;
}
`);

setWatch(c.press, BTN1, {repeat:true, edge:"both", irq:true});

setInterval(function() {
  print(c.get());
}, 10000);

In the example above, a C function is called from an interrupt when a pin changes state (so runs very quickly), and it then changes a variable which can then be read back with normal JavaScript.

You can even access data stored in flat strings:

var c = E.compiledC(`
// int sum(int, int)

int sum(int len, unsigned char *data){
  int s = 0;
  while (len--)
    s += *(data++);
  return s;
}
`);


var str  = E.toString("\1\2\3\4\5\6"); // create a flat string
print(c.sum(str.length, E.getAddressOf(str,true)));

Hope you have fun with this! It could potentially be used to create modules for all kind of things - for example MP3 decoders, realtime audio effects, or accessing on-chip peripherals that aren't exposed in Espruino normally.