Release Notes (Versions history)

LibertyEiffel (latest release first)

For upcoming releases see the list of names.

User-visible changes:
- removed linebreaks in compiler output
- many bugfixes (including the long lasting weak references bug with the BDW GC)
Developer changes:
Known bugs:
- no (hopefully)

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, those 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