The latest updates have been mainly been bug fixes as I try to “complete” V4 so I can take a break and then start V5. The bug reports have been slowing down so I think the trend is heading in the right direction. I’ve been getting more and more people who are running against the 2GB memory limit imposed on 32bit Windows programs. Most of the time this is a problem with the settings they’ve chosen but there are a few people who are looking to do really big work with MeshCAM. Since I had been planning to add a 64 bit version in the future I figured I’d just try to compile it as 64 bit to see what happened. Hours and hours of little changes, finding out how to rebuild all of my 3rd party libraries as 64 bit, and removing old code that I didn’t need anymore and I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Part of the problem is that I build all of my release code with Visual Studio set to treat warnings as errors. Many of the warnings you get when you move to 64 bit are warnings that will never cause any trouble in MeshCAM. That being said, I’ve put a lot of work over the years in my “warnings are errors” policy and I’m not eager to relax that now even for 64 bit builds.
Once I do get it fully compiling I need to decide how I want to release it- as a V5 alpha or as V4. V5 is probably the route I’ll take because hundred of lines of code have been changed to make 64 bit builds work and I don’t want V4 to regress at all.