Vale v0.2.0 Release

New features:

• Can now break from inside a loop!
• Adds const generics.
• Adds concept functions.

Simplified syntax:

• Removed function signatures' impl MyInterface, no longer needed.
• Removed permissions and pointers
• Improved ownership rules, method calling on a returned value now sends own, really good for builders
• Added postfix borrow
• ret is now return
• Weak references are now &&

stdlib changes:

• Added stdlib back into main Vale repo
• Added hash set diff iter, moved collections to their own dirs
• Changed has() to Contains() and ContainsKey()
• Made remove() return the old value
• Added HashSet.GetRandomElement, List.Reverse, fsqrt, lshift, rshift, xor, i64(i32), mod(i64, i64), Opt.==, Opt.clone, Opt.or, str.charAt
• Added Higher RAII for HashMap and Opt

Under the hood:

• Bumped to LLVM 13
• Added a new parser that doesn't use combinators
• Added interning to compiler

0.1.4 adds some major syntactical improvements, run-time speedups, compile-time speedups, and a lot of foundational improvements behind the scenes.

Optimizations:

• Eagerly calculated hashes, and switched from lists to vecs. 10-11x speedup!
• Added Solver, the next generics solver. Uses normalized rules, much more optimizable.
• New list uses the new arrays, should be much faster

User-visible language changes:

• Now two kinds of non-owning reference: borrow ref like &Ship and pointer ref like *Ship. Midas will soon treat these differently.
• Added break
• Added foreach
• Added basic variadic members!
• Added new functions: range(int, int), i64(i32), migrate for arrays
• Now need sealed on the interface to define abstract functions outside an interface
• All parameters need a type. fn do(callable) -> fn do<F>(callable F)
• Destructors:
  • Now need #!DeriveStructDrop now to make custom destructors.
  • Custom destructors are now called drop, not destructor.
• Syntax changes:
  • Changed pack destructures from (...) to [...]
  • Changed tuples from [...] to (...)
  • fn is now func
  • Changed lambda syntax:
    • (x){ x 5 } is now x => x 5
    • (x, y){ moo(); foo(); } is now (x, y) => { moo(); foo(); }
  • Changed rules(...) to where ...
  • Moved struct's mutability specifier to before rules
  • = 5; is now just 5, like Scala and Rust
  • Put attributes (pure, extern, export, abstract, etc) before fn. export is now exported.
  • Arrays:
    • Changed making syntax, [vary *](5, {}) is now [](5, {)} or Array(...)
    • We can now destroy an RSA with () = arr; to mirror structs.
• Array semantics:
  • Array<M, V, E> is now Array<M, E>, all arrays are now varying.
  • Added push/pop support for arrays.
  • Added .capacity() for arrays, plus an instructino for it.
• Extern boundary:
  • Obviated ValeReleaseMessage, added _vasp for getting message sizes
  • We no longer need artificial pointers on the extern boundary!
• Misc:
  • Removed IFunction1 from builtins, its no longer needed by the compiler.
  • Added i64 to string
  • Made a functor struct, to give to the array instructions, since they need a 'this' object basically

Tooling changes:

• Changed how install scripts pull in stdlib project
• Merged package-unix/windows scripts into others
• Cleaned up Driver build process
• Made a Utils module to use in Driver and Tester, and it has stdlib additions
• Added census, asan, debug_output flags
• Made it move the old build directory to a random /tmp subdir
• New CI, thanks to kevin!
• Using supplied bootstrapping valec stdlib for Driver and Tester now
• Cleaned out old scripts
• Clarified flags for Driver
• Made the scripts test the unzipped zip
• Made the scripts return 1 if they fail
• Removed valec.py from zip
• Split windows script into an install and build script, like mac and linux
• Added Driver, a.k.a. valec
• Added Tester, which runs our Midas tests now

Compiler changes:

• Rewrote most of the parser to manual recursive descent
• Added Void back in, no longer reusing empty tuples
• Fixed some Never handling bugs
• Things after Never aren't even evaluated, Hammer strips them out.
• Made Midas BlockState a linked list, so we can jump to the end of nearest loop
• Made Consecutor the only thing that could repeat expressions. Most blocks contain them now.
• Moved drop_into into builtins
• Made tuple an extern struct, using variadic members.
• Removed RawArray, it doesn't fit anymore since all RSAs are varying.
• Added an error for the rune type solver
• Separated a GlobalOptions module
• Removed astronomers specific rules
• Removed types from the astronomer rules.
  • Learned: It's not always a great thing to denormalize data, it leads to inconsistency opportunities. An instance of premature optimization likely. Now I'm questioning why .ll does this.
• Added better humanizing of errors
• Added a MUCH better solver error printer
• Brought back the distinction between declaration names and imprecise names
• Made a better distinction between drop and free
• Fixed build failure counting bug in Tester
• Took out localRunes and knowableRunes from Astronomer, moved some of that logic back into astronomer.
  • Learned: It's not always a great thing to pull as much logic as possible out of Templar. In this case, reducing the amount of code in Templar actually increased its complexity, ironically.
• Changed some astronomer tests into integration tests, feeding actual vale source code now.
  • Learned: Unit tests have a high cost in maintaining the inputs. Perhaps unit tests only make sense on very established chunks of code.
• Moved a bunch of hardcoded functions (weaks, drop, free, array len, panic) to actual vale code.
• Removed special PackTT type.
• Added the "macro" concept, for any syntactical sugar features (or semantic sugar? like anonymous substructs, theyre kind of semantic sugar I guess?)
• Moved drop functions into macros.
• Moved anonymous substruct functionality into macros.
• Better distinction between a template name and a stamped name, see CitizenNameT vs CitizenTemplateNameT.
• Fixed types starting with _, like __Never
• Added free() functions for interfaces, which then call virtualfree(). Now, there is a normal free() function for every immutable type.
• Fixed printing exceptions twice in tests
• Added a "Location In Function" notion, so places in the code are marked by tree-shaped paths
• Made impl rules sane again, no more NMORFI!
• Changed the default namespace to __vale, for Midas
• Made the compiler spit out a different .vast per package
• Put the generated files in include/ and abi/
• Put generated .vast files into vast/, and .vpst files into vpst/
• Fixed exported mutable refs, they no longer require their members be exported too
• Using = instead of : for module mappings in the CLI
• Updated build instructions
• Added NodeEnvironment to templar for breaks too
• Made most of the expressiontemplar and nearby templars use NodeEnvironmentBox
• renamed constraint to borrow
• cleaned up precise vs imprecise names
• removed Maybe from variable uses
• Replaced builtin functions with generators
• Fixed kldc test