Hi all, At the context meeting we presented (and discussed) the state of luatex and released 1.08 as a prelude to 1.09. Today we announce version 1.09.
We are gradually entering into a "bug fix / no more features" mode. The goal is to have the beginning of "stable" luatex 1.10 for next texlive 2019, and in our minds "stable" means "in the long term like pdftex". In practice this means that luatex comes with lua 5.3.4, that luajittex uses luajit 2.1 beta3, and that context will assume and support this setup for a long time. This also means that we will keep the lua 5.3.4 API. Issues with luajitex will be solved whenever it is possible, but we expect that some platforms will not have luajittex and this is nothing new, as it already happens in texlive. By going stable we also hope that those using the lua interfaces will not be catched by surprises. The internals are predictable enough for that. We have a new pdf parser (pplib from Paweł Jackowski) that replaces poppler. It is much smaller, a bit faster and it's written in pure C so it fits also well with our idea of "stable" wrt to the compiler versions. It also removes a dependency on a large library set. We are actively testing it but appreciate testing from "power users" (like Hraban did at the ctx meeting). Of course our powerful buildbot farm helps a lot in the process. We will of course try to make the luatex manual better and further document mkiv features. If you have suggestions for context, don't hesitate to ask because we keep evolving. We would like to stress the terms "gradually" and "beginning": practically we think means that, at least for the next year, there will be our "usual" cycle of intermediate bugfix releases, but at this point we are quite sure that for the TeX users the core features are both powerful and complete enough for a large set of useful applications, and context is an example of such application. At the same time, we are not stopping research and developing, if only because the rest of the world is moving on. As usual the context meeting is place where we will report the results. Happy using, Luigi & Hans
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