Having just shipped 8.3.93, a small update to our major 8.3 release from earlier this year, it's time to take a look ahead at what's coming for Elements, for the remainder of the year and beyond. We have great things planned!

First of, we have an additional 8.3.95 update (codename "Freedom Class") planned for sometimes around June/July, bringing more bug fixes and minor improvements.

At the same time, the team has been busy at work on major new things for a while now, coming in Elements 8.4 (codename "Galaxy Class") later this year.

For the next couple of months, we'll be shipping preview builds of both development branches, so that you guys can get the latest fixes, but also start to get an early look at the 8.4 stuff. We'll be trying to stick to a bi-weekly schedule, where one week we'll ship an 8.3.x beta (which we started with last Friday), and an 8.4 alpha the next. And so on.

In most cases, the 8.4 alphas will be true super-sets of the 8.3 branch – in other words, they'll have all the fixes and minor improvements of the 8.3 beta (plus an extra week worth of work on 8.3, of course), plus our ongoing new feature work.

If all goes well, you can expect the first 8.4 alpha this coming Friday.

So what is new in 8.4? Many things. Elements 8.4 will be a major milestone release, and we are very excited about it. It will bring two new platforms (either final or as stable and useable preview), and many exciting language changes and improvements, as well. Future blog posts over the next few weeks will go into more detail, but here are some highlights:

  • New "Gotham" meta platform
  • New "Island" native platforms. This is the one you'll want to get really excited about. More info coming soon.
  • A new Unified Class Syntax for Oxygene
  • Full Swift 3.0 support for Silver
  • Full Type Extension support for C#
  • Support for Constrained Type Extensions
  • Default Interface/Protocol Methods
  • Integrated EUnit Testing in Fire

And that's just a scratch at the surface of what we have in store for you.

I hope you're as excited about Elements 8.4 as I am. Stay tuned for more details in future posts, and for the first Alpha!

Yours,
marc