It was planned for some time, but I was lazy and for good
Now 2.0.9 contains the latest FASM 1.71 compiler.
FreshLib has new string constants macros that avoid string duplication and does not compiles not used string constants.
Generally speaking, this release can be considered "major" and "important" release.
Some incompatibility with the old sources is introduced.

Download this release from the Fresh home page or from the mirror.

Hi, John. It's me again, with one more idea.
Is it hard to make not just syntax-highlight but fully different styles for comments, instructions, labels, etc.?
For example, instructions could be bold, comments - italic, numbers could have different font. Like in NotePad++. This would make code easy readable.

Cool idea, but I think it will force a rewrite of an editor.
Because, once you have a multiple fonts in editor - it will require to
calculate all X,Y on cursor/caret and this will be hell to do and may slow down the editing.

But this only needs to be done for the page currently displayed. And I would expect the computer can compute the widths in a few micro-seconds, much faster then any human user can type.

I am working on new editor for Fresh (discussion and screenshots) and maybe I will make different font attributes for the syntax highlighter and many advanced features as well.

The work goes slow, so you should be patient. I am now rewriting it from scratch for second time.

Will Fresh be available for Vista (it doesn't like my 64-bit Vista Home Premium SP2)? Is it stable under other 64-bit Windows versions? What OSs have you tested it on? (What is your development platform?)

Thanks. I look forward to being able to try it.

Fresh IDE is developed under Win XP and partially under Linux Wine.
I was tested it under the Win 7 as well.
I can't test it under Vista or any 64bit OS because I simply don't have this OS installed and all of my computers are 32 bit.

AFAIK, there should be no problems with 64 bit OSes, because they provide 32bit compatibility.

Are you tested it under Vista? What kind of problems you have with Fresh?

I've been working in Fresh under Win7 x64 every day for nearly 3-4 months. No problems were found.
But I didn't use all features: I'm writing OS, so several things (like debugger, windows designer) are not needed for me.

I'm using version 2.0.9 and double-click on Fresh.exe from Explorer. Once the screen comes up, I click on the "Open file" icon, navigate to the "examples\Fractal" subdirectory from the installation path, then double-click on Mandelbrod.asm. So far, so good. But then I click the "Compiles the project" button, no problem. But on the second click, I get the Microsoft Windows message "Fresh.exe has stopped working".

If I click on the Debug button, it just locks up (I haven't waited longer than a couple minutes, I just assume it's locked up).

I just repeated the above and I was able to pull up a debugger (MS Visual Studio). At address 00401161 is the "int 3" statement just before a procedure restores regs and the stack frame and returns. I haven't done any just-in-time debugging before so don't really know what to do next.

BTW, there was (and still is) a plan to integrate Fresh IDE with emulators like qemu in order to make OS development easier. Unfortunately I have no time to make it. But some day...


The internal debugger is not finished, not stable and buggy. Use external debugger like OllyDbg instead.
I will check this bug report and maybe will find something, but I can't test it in Vista.
The mentioned int3 instruction is located in "freshlib/system/Win32/memory.asm" line 183.
It indicates that the HeapFree function failed. You should check the stack in order to determine from where this function (FreeMem) was called.

In all cases, you can try to compile Fresh yourself (compile the file "source/Fresh.fpr") and then use "Goto address" = "ctrl+G", in order to determine where some address is located in the source.

When you compile Fresh you have to wait a little in order to let Fresh to process the .fas file with needed debug information. This is because Fresh process this file in background mode.

BTW, fractal example is not very typical project for compilation test. It demonstrates some uncommon FASM tricks for picture file compilation instead of program code.

Ah, ejamesr, it is not good idea to compile the examples .asm files in Fresh IDE. It is possible, but it is not for a beginner.
Better open the corresponding .fpr file.
It is a project file that contains the proper compiling parameters - memory, file names and environment variables for the compiler.

That seems to work a bit better now. I hadn't tried the internal debugger, but it doesn't seem to work. But I can get Ollydbg to work, so that will allow me to play with it a bit. Seems like I have to tweak some aliases (it's complaining about %TargetOS% not existing, so I had to initialize that first).

Are there many people in this forum who depend on Fresh for business development? In other words, is this stable enough to use regularly?

I use it in my work to write production programs - i.e. that control some industrial equipment. The IDE itself is pretty stable, unless you get some bug. Simple change in the user behavior usually allow to work around most of the bugs.
I am trying to fix them as I found them, but it seems my work style makes Fresh to not crash very often.