On July 24, MetaQuotes announced a set of major changes for the whole MT4 community. Among other things, they have promised a new IDE (integrated development environment) for MetaTrader 4 that would still compile .mq4 into .ex4, but will be able to work with all MetaTrader 5 functions, will add the whole OOP functionality, at the same time retaining the MT4 position/order system. That sounded quite good in everyone’s opinion.
On August 26, they have released a beta version of this new IDE. It was not too bad for a beta, but it introduced some problems. First of all, the directory structure for the source code files changed to that of MQL5, so if you have a lot of interdependent files, you will now have to redistribute them across the new directory structure. Then, there will be a lot of new warnings and (likely) errors showing up during compilation of the old code. Although the new IDE is designed to be compatible with both MQL4 and MQL5 languages, it rejects some of the valid MQL4 syntax:
- Variable names with dot symbol produce errors.
Switch-case expressions with anything but integers produce errors.- If any of your MQL4 variables are called by one of the predefined language keywords from MT5 (e.g. _Period), you will get errors.
- Some other minor cases of new compilation errors.
Yes, the new IDE offers better functions, adds classes, provides better protection against decompilation (which is necessary to create an app store for MT4 scripts), but it also adds risk to invalidate thousands of previously correct code files and snippets. Will MetaQuotes be able to handle this task with minimum damage to the community? Or will the resulting loss of code base be a justified tradeoff for the features?
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September 10th, 2013 at 9:38 pm
Will this allow MT4 indicators to work on the MT5 platform? That is my biggest worry if/when they make everyone use MT5.
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admin Reply:
September 10th, 2013 at 10:05 pm
As far as I understand it, it won’t. But it will allow developers to produce new indicators that would compile the same in MT4 and MT5.
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Andy Reply:
October 16th, 2013 at 7:11 pm
Metaquotes tried to force MT5 on traders and brokers alike and they rejected it, I see this as them trying to pull all the MT4 traders over in stages since their initial roll out to the marketplace was lackluster at best.
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Andriy Moraru Reply:
October 16th, 2013 at 8:00 pm
Yeah, perhaps. Yet this update is basically offering some of the goodies from MT5 without transferring its position system (which widely hated among MT4 traders).
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September 11th, 2013 at 5:12 am
Yes, i think they are doing the right thing. They should done that in the first place while developing the MQL5, it will save them some time debugging
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September 18th, 2013 at 6:19 pm
Do you think this is a way to leverage the headstart MT4 has over MT5, despite being an older platform?
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admin Reply:
September 18th, 2013 at 7:36 pm
I think they do it to launch an App Marketplace for MT4 products.
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October 28th, 2013 at 9:25 am
Metaquotes failed to make MT5 backwards compatible in both order handling functionality (so the trader needs to change habit) and programming language (so programmers of all levels need to change habit). There has been a general failure to produce a platform better than MT4 because MT4 gives folks what they want and need. Bloated, arcane so-called object-oriented (Java, C++ etc) platforms do not appeal to most users and have, in general, poor (I’m being kind) object models. Why is Excel so popular? For the same reason that it is simple to use, and, with a LITTLE programming knowledge, it can be used to get the job done. If Metaquotes continue to ignore these facts, they are dooming themselves to lose their current foothold.
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