Changes

Each of the above people contributed object inheritance in some form or another, but I wanted to specifically touch on the challenges in inheritance. Object inheritance was much easier using with, because we could easily add the inherited properties to an object, and when called, not worry about where it is being called from. When with is removed, we had to maintain this data internally, and be able to prepend the right object to the right method calls. This got significantly more complicated when you consider where things may be called from, including super constructors, and super methods calling methods form its parent, calling these potentially chaining calls in the correct order. Because we have to store all created classes methods at the time of parsing, we don't yet know if another class will use it as a super class, so all classes and their properties must be stored, so later we can prepend the correct object to the correct calls in a complex chain of limitless inherited calls. This was buggy and fragile code that took a while to get right, but Notmasteryet's work helped a ton in this area, and something we are quite proud of.

Some of the differences between Java and JavaScript presented some unique challenges. Some of which are still unsolved. Because at the time of parsing, we are just parsing the code as if it was pure text, so we cannot validate any of the data referenced in the code. When an image is to be loaded in the code, the client will now have to download that image from the server, this is a unique problem that Processing does not have. This means an image may not be available when needed, and getting that data directly from the source at time of parse is not reliable, we would need to know this before we parse. We solved this by adding a directive at the top of the code that would define all images needed to be preloaded, so we can parse the directive first, then convert the code to JavaScript, then run it, safely knowing images will be ready to use at run time. Java supports overloading, in that its functions are uniquly identified by their name, return type, and parameters, this making up a function's signature. ( - source this ) JavaScript only holds the function name as its signature, presenting another unique problem. We can check the number of parameters in a function, and merge all overloaded functions into one, and check the number of arguments passed in, to know which block to call. This check is at run time, not at call time as Java would do it. However, we currently do not reliably check the type of the arguments passed in, so it will break if a function has two versions, first accepting a single string as the only argument, and the second accepting a single number as the only argument. Similarly, if we have a variable using the same name as a function, called variable name overloading, we will break in the same way. This is because Java would consider these different things, and JavaScript considers a function to be a variable of a different type, sharing the same space.