Announce: Niecza Perl 6 v13
This is the thirteenth release of Niecza Perl 6, as usual scheduled on
the last Monday of the month. I'm on winter break now, which means lots
of time for improvements. Muahahaha. A large portion of the improvements
have been in regular expression support.
Will Coleda and Solomon Foster are working on fudging spectests so they run on
Niecza; between that and actual improvements, we've gained 5000+ working
spectests since the last release. See [4] for a dramatic visual.
You can obtain a build of Niecza from [1]. This build contains a
working compiler as a set of .exe and .dll files suitable for use with
Mono or Microsoft .NET. If you wish to follow latest developments,
you can obtain the source from [2]; however, you will still need a
binary for bootstrapping, so you gain nothing from a "source is
better" perspective.
Niecza is a Perl 6 compiler project studying questions about the
efficient implementability of Perl 6 features. It currently targets
the Common Language Runtime; both Mono and Microsoft .NET are known to
work. On Windows, Cygwin is required for source builds only; see the
README for details.
List of changes
[Breaking changes]
/ <{ foo }> / is no longer accepted as a synonym for / <?{ foo }> /.
$0 is no longer allowed to mean $/ when there is no capture zero.
$/.ast no longer defaults to ~$/. Use $() if you want that.
[Major features]
New-style character class expressions like <:Uppercase & :Greek> are
now supported.
Unicode property access is now supported! In addition to the use in
regexes, there is also a minimal Niecza::UCD module which allows querying
the properties of characters. All non-Unihan properties defined in
Unicode 6.0.0 are available.
Runtime number parsing has been radically extended and now supports the
full gamut of Perl 6 number syntaxes.
[Minor features]
Supplementary characters are now generally supported, though StrPos-type
counting for chars, substr, etc is still in UTF-16 code units.
codes is now available, for when you need to actually count code points
(be aware that it is O(n)).
The regex infix operators & and && are now supported (currently treated
as synonyms, but don't rely on this).
&pow is a little bit smarter and needlessly returns NaN in fewer cases
(Solomon Foster, Stefan O'Rear).
Imported a few tweaks from STD, including a better message for say$_.
\h \v \s \w and \d now use the recommended UTS18[3] definitions.
\n, $$, and ^^ now match any vertical whitespace, including CRLF as
a single unit.
% is now supported for all quantifiers and %% is available too.
$() @() %() are now supported.
/$var/ now allows $var to be a Regex. Likewise /<$var>/, /@var/,
and /<@var>/ have been added. / <{...}> / now does the right thing.
The implementation of $<foo>=[...] has been considerably simplified
and depessimized.
/ <.$foo> / assertion syntax is now supported.
/ <foo> / will now call a lexical "my regex foo" if possible. To minimize
potential accidents, this applies ONLY to regexes, tokens, and rules;
despite using the same namespace, a "my sub foo" will not be called.
/ <&foo(...)> / now allows arguments.
@<foo> now correctly contextualizes.
Nontrivial regex protos, like "proto regex foo { "bar" {*} }", are now
implemented.
<( and )> are now supported.
Added Match methods: kv, keys, values, caps, chunks, prematch, postmatch.
Added \c[] syntax in strings and regexes.
Rat and FatRat now stringify as fractions.
Inf now stringifies as "Inf" rather than leaking C# Infinity.
Added predefined quasi-property rules like <alnum>.
Added Niecza::Benchmark, providing the barest minimum of functionality like
Perl 5's "Benchmark".
Inf, NaN correctly handled in rounding, Cool.truncate, &kv, Pair.invert,
&srand, allow :x(*) in subst, .chr, .ord, .chrs, .ords, &chrs, &ords,
trim methods, &roll, .roll(*), end, min, max, minmax (Solomon Foster)
Added .pick(*), corrected Str and Numeric for Range (Will Coleda)
classify (Moritz Lenz)
[Selected bug fixes]
Threads.pm6 is working again, now with exception-safe locking.
[Other]
There is now documentation on how to prepare releases.
Getting involved
Contact sorear in irc.freenode.net #perl6 or via the sender address of
this mailing. Also check out the TODO file; whether you want to work
on stuff on it, or have cool ideas to add to it, both are good.
Future directions
My current priorities are:
1. Make regexes much more feature-complete, including general Unicode
properties and grapheme mode
2. Prototype the debugger
3. 6model convergence work, including roles/native types
4. Figure out how modules and S11 stuff should work in Niecza. Do it.
[1] https://github.com/downloads/sorear/niecza/niecza-13.zip
[2] https://github.com/sorear/niecza
[3] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18/
[4] https://github.com/flussence/specgraphs/raw/master/impls.png
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
