Basically - I haven't written any code for this in quite a while. I've worked a bit on the enhanced versions of graphic sets, but that's it.
Since I didn't get
too far in the first place, and I do see a lot of criticism of Delphi (not to mention using it is a major factor preventing cross-platform; although Lazarus exists it doesn't seem to work so well for cross-platform use in graphical apps in practice)... I'm wondering how logical it might be to try and learn something new, and start again using that, also somewhat using this as a project to learn the new language.
If I was going to learn something new, key factors would be:
- Needs to be capable of cross-platform use, otherwise that kills the whole point of moving away from Delphi.
- It'd have to be something that's useful and widespread in general. No obscure languages that might be cross-platform suitable, but don't have much real-world usage.
- Nothing
too complicated. I am not going to try and make NL2 in
Brainfuck.
- Needs to be compilable. So, sorry Java and Python.
Any recommendations from the programmer-types among the userbase? For the record, I currently have decent amounts of experience with BASIC and Delphi, some very basic knowledge of PHP, and am currently learning Python through university (needed one paper that could be literally anything the uni offers to complete my degree, so I thought "why not, this seems like something I could handle quite well"). I figure the obvious candidates would be C or C++ (dabbled with them in the past but never really got the hang of them, but I was a lot less capable at that time), but I'm open to other ideas.
If there really isn't anything suitable, I may consider just slowly modifying NL1 towards the intended feature set for NL2, rather than going for a full-blown rewrite.
EDIT: I also should mention - the less files there are in the final program that aren't actual data files (DLLs, etc), the better. For reference, current NeoLemmix only uses a single DLL (Bass.DLL), and even that gets built into the EXE (and extracted and run from memory at runtime).