Yann Spöri

It is often useful if a program knows the time when it was build and/or the git repository revision id it was build from. Unfortunately, one often forgets to update this information before launching the build. The following code can be used to do this automatically.

(P.S.: The code works even when compiling towards “non-Sys” platforms like JavaScript.)

class BuildInfo {
    /**
     * The time when this library was build.
     */
    public static var buildTime(default, null):Int = getBuildTime();

    /**
     * The git reversion that was used for the build.
     */
    public static var gitRev(default, null):String = getGITRevision();

    /**
     * Macros initalizing the build information.
     */
    public static macro function getBuildTime() {
        var buildTime = Math.floor(Date.now().getTime() / 1000);
        return macro $v{buildTime};
    }
    public static macro function getGITRevision() {
        var gitrev = new sys.io.Process("git", [ "rev-parse", "--verify", "HEAD" ]).stdout.readAll().toString();
        return macro $v{gitrev};
    }

    public static function main() {
        trace("This library was build the " + BuildInfo.buildTime);
        trace("by using revision " + BuildInfo.gitRev);
    }
}

The “==” operator to check object equality is implemented differently in the various programming languages. For example in Java, the “==” operator checks only the reference and you need the “equals”-Method in order to check the equality of objects:

String s1 = "foo";
String s2 = "foo";
System.out.println("" + (s1 == s2)); // will return false
System.out.println("" + (s1.equals(s2))); // will return true

In other languages like PHP, the “==”-operator can behave even more … strange …:

$a = "3.14159265358979326666666666";
$b = "3.14159265358979323846264338";
echo "" . ($a == $b); // will be 1 == true

So how is the “==”-operator defined in HaXe that can be cross-compiled into multiple languages including PHP and Java?

Well within Haxe, basic types like Int, Float, Strings and Bools are compared by values. So:

class Test {
    static function main() {
        var c1:String = "Hello";
        var c2:String = "World";
        trace(c1 == c2);  // will return false
        var c1:String = "Hello";
        var c2:String = "Hello";
        trace(c1 == c2);  // will return true
    }
}

However nob basic types are compared by-reference:

class C { public function new() {} }

class Test {
    static function main() {
        var c1:C = null;
        var c2:C = null;
        trace(c1 == c2); // will return true
        var c1:C = new C();
        var c2:C = new C();
        trace(c1 == c2); // will return false
    }
}