Difference between revisions of "Release Notes (Versions history)"

Revision as of 23:08, 26 May 2016

For upcoming releases see the list of names.

released in May 2016
first release since LibertyEiffel has become the official GNU Eiffel compiler
User-visible changes:
- changed Environment Variable name from SmartEiffel to LibertyEiffel (anyhow, normally it should not be necessary to set this one)
- new tool Mock
- removed linebreaks in compiler output
- many bugfixes
- GC call at exit is optional
- generic creation
- agents are now closures
- finder now finds all classes in the universe with the given name, not only the first one
- keyword is at the beginning of a feature is now deprecated
- Added support for alias "[]" and alias "()"
- constants are now visible in the eiffeldoc generated documentation
Known bugs:
- there is still an issue in both GC implementations (classical SEGC and BDW), if it shows up, it often yields a "Bad target type" runtime error.
- for the full list see [2]

First release as LibertyEiffel
User-visible changes:
- Added NATURAL_8, NATURAL_16, NATURAL_32, and NATURAL_64 classes. See tutorial/natural.e for examples.
- Even low-level features (i.e. external "built_in") are now checking their assertions. As an example, division by zero is now checked by assertions.
- Inlined dynamic dispatch for better performance
- A missing export clause is deprecated. Use {ANY} instead.
- New core libraries: cli, json, log, parse (beware, these libraries are not yet tuned to be used without GC)
- Improved libraries: string (with notably a new FIXED_STRING class)
- Wrapper libraries: gtk, gdk, readline, ffi...
- A new tool that can generate mocks to help unit testing
- BDW GC support
Developer changes:
- The web site now belongs to the repository
- Automatic testing tools (ET on the web, and watch_eiffeltest.sh in the shell)
- Automatic Debian packages generation
Known bugs:
- BDW GC is not well tested; currently weak references seem not to work properly; and the GC is not run at program exit (it should run all finalizers)
- Sometimes SmartEiffel's native GC behaves wrongly, analysis is welcome
- Some of the newer core libraries do not work very well when there is no GC
- See the bugs page

Again, a lot of novelties for this release:

New typing rules have been revisited and are now crystal clear. See this page for details.
Implemented a new class loading algorithm, which takes into account the "distance" between classes, thus reifying the notion of clusters and sub-clusters. Everything is trans

@@ Line 13: / Line 13: @@
 === Bell (2016.05, named after [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell Alexander Graham Bell]) ===
 * released in May 2016
-* first release since LibertyEiffel is the official GNU Eiffel compiler
+* first release since LibertyEiffel has become the official GNU Eiffel compiler
 * User-visible changes:
 ** changed Environment Variable name from SmartEiffel to LibertyEiffel (anyhow, normally it should not be necessary to set this one)
@@ Line 21: / Line 21: @@
 ** GC call at exit is optional
 ** generic creation
-** Agents are now [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming) closures ]
+** agents are now [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming) closures ]
 ** finder now finds all classes in the universe with the given name, not only the first one
 ** keyword '''is''' at the beginning of a feature is now deprecated