Version 0.8.14 released

09 February 2012 Andreas Rumpf

Version 0.8.14 has been released!

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a serious memory corruption concerning message passing.
  • Fixed a serious bug concerning different instantiations of a generic proc.
  • Fixed a newly introduced bug where a wrong EIO exception was raised for the end of file for text files that do not end with a newline.
  • Bugfix c2nim, c2pas: the --out option has never worked properly.
  • Bugfix: forwarding of generic procs never worked.
  • Some more bugfixes for macros and compile-time evaluation.
  • The GC now takes into account interior pointers on the stack which may be introduced by aggressive C optimizers.
  • Nimrod’s native allocator/GC now works on PowerPC.
  • Lots of other bugfixes: Too many to list them all.

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

  • Removed deprecated os.AppendFileExt, os.executeShellCommand, os.iterOverEnvironment, os.pcDirectory, os.pcLinkToDirectory, os.SplitPath, os.extractDir, os.SplitFilename, os.extractFileTrunk, os.extractFileExt, osproc.executeProcess, osproc.executeCommand.
  • Removed deprecated parseopt.init, parseopt.getRestOfCommandLine.
  • Moved strutils.validEmailAddress to matchers.validEmailAddress.
  • The pointer dereference operator ^ has been removed, so that ^ can now be a user-defined operator.
  • implies is no keyword anymore.
  • The is operator is now the of operator.
  • The is operator is now used to check type equivalence in generic code.
  • The pure pragma for procs has been renamed to noStackFrame.
  • The threading API has been completely redesigned.
  • The unidecode module is now thread-safe and its interface has changed.
  • The bind expression is deprecated, use a bind declaration instead.
  • system.raiseHook is now split into system.localRaiseHook and system.globalRaiseHook to distinguish between thread local and global raise hooks.
  • Changed exception handling/error reporting for os.removeFile and os.removeDir.
  • The algorithm for searching and loading configuration files has been changed.
  • Operators now have diffent precedence rules: Assignment-like operators (like *=) are now special-cased.
  • The fields in TStream have been renamed to have an Impl suffix because they should not be used directly anymore. Wrapper procs have been created that should be used instead.
  • export is now a keyword.
  • assert is now implemented in pure Nimrod as a template; it’s easy to implement your own assertion templates with system.astToStr.

Language Additions

  • Added new is and of operators.
  • The built-in type void can be used to denote the absence of any type. This is useful in generic code.
  • Return types may be of the type var T to return an l-value.
  • The error pragma can now be used to mark symbols whose usage should trigger a compile-time error.
  • There is a new discardable pragma that can be used to mark a routine so that its result can be discarded implicitly.
  • Added a new noinit pragma to prevent automatic initialization to zero of variables.
  • Constants can now have the type seq.
  • There is a new user-definable syntactic construct a{i, ...} that has no semantics yet for built-in types and so can be overloaded to your heart’s content.
  • bind (used for symbol binding in templates and generics) is now a declarative statement.
  • Nimrod now supports single assignment variables via the let statement.
  • Iterators named items and pairs are implicitly invoked when an explicit iterator is missing.
  • The slice assignment a[i..j] = b where a is a sequence or string now supports splicing.

Compiler Additions

  • The compiler can generate C++ code for easier interfacing with C++.
  • The compiler can generate Objective C code for easier interfacing with Objective C.
  • The new pragmas importcpp and importobjc make interfacing with C++ and Objective C somewhat easier.
  • Added a new pragma incompleteStruct to deal with incomplete C struct definitions.
  • Added a --nimcache:PATH configuration option for control over the output directory for generated code.
  • The --genScript option now produces different compilation scripts which do not contain absolute paths.
  • Added --cincludes:dir, --clibdir:lib configuration options for modifying the C compiler’s header/library search path in cross-platform way.
  • Added --clib:lib configuration option for specifying additional C libraries to be linked.
  • Added --mainmodule:file configuration options for specifying the main project file. This is intended to be used in project configuration files to allow commands like nimrod c or nimrod check to be executed anywhere within the project’s directory structure.
  • Added a --app:staticlib option for creating static libraries.
  • Added a --tlsEmulation:on|off switch for control over thread local storage emulation.
  • The compiler and standard library now support a taint mode. Input strings are declared with the TaintedString string type. If the taint mode is turned on it is a distinct string type which helps to detect input validation errors.
  • The compiler now supports the compilation cache via --symbolFiles:on. This potentially speeds up compilations by an order of magnitude, but is still highly experimental!
  • Added --import:file and --include:file configuration options for specifying modules that will be automatically imported/incluced.
  • nimrod i can now optionally be given a module to execute.
  • The compiler now performs a simple alias analysis to generate better code.
  • The compiler and ENDB now support watchpoints.
  • The compiler now supports proper compile time expressions of type bool for on|off switches in pragmas. In order to not break existing code, on and off are now aliases for true and false and declared in the system module.
  • The compiler finally supports closures. This is a preliminary implementation, which does not yet support nestings deeper than 1 level and still has many known bugs.

Library Additions

  • Added system.allocShared, system.allocShared0, system.deallocShared, system.reallocShared.
  • Slicing as implemented by the system module now supports splicing.
  • Added explicit channels for thread communication.
  • Added matchers module for email address etc. matching.
  • Added strutils.unindent, strutils.countLines, strutils.replaceWord.
  • Added system.slurp for easy resource embedding.
  • Added system.running for threads.
  • Added system.programResult.
  • Added xmltree.innerText.
  • Added os.isAbsolute, os.dynLibFormat, os.isRootDir, os.parentDirs.
  • Added parseutils.interpolatedFragments.
  • Added macros.treeRepr, macros.lispRepr, macros.dumpTree, macros.dumpLisp, macros.parseExpr, macros.parseStmt, macros.getAst.
  • Added locks core module for more flexible locking support.
  • Added irc module.
  • Added ftpclient module.
  • Added memfiles module.
  • Added subexes module.
  • Added critbits module.
  • Added asyncio module.
  • Added actors module.
  • Added algorithm module for generic sort, reverse etc. operations.
  • Added osproc.startCmd, osproc.execCmdEx.
  • The osproc module now uses posix_spawn instead of fork and exec on Posix systems. Define the symbol useFork to revert to the old implementation.
  • Added intsets.assign.
  • Added system.astToStr and system.rand, system.doAssert.
  • Added system.pairs for built-in types like arrays and strings.