Whiley v0.3.13 Released!

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Well, it’s been almost two months in the making, but here’s the next release of Whiley.  Quite of lot of changes, although there remain significant issues to resolve — particularly with the front-end.

ChangeLog

  • Fixed outstanding problem with list and set types related to type tests.  More specifically, on the negative branch of a type test the correct type was not always being calculated.

  • Added support for open records.

  • Added a CONTRIBUTORS file for recording project contributors.  This is based on the developers certificate of origin used by the Linux Kernel.

  • Changed syntax for processes to be now “references”.  This avoids conflicting the name with OS processes.  So, e.g. type process T becomes ref T.

  • Changed syntax for dereferncing objects to use * and ->, similar to C.

  • Changed syntax for maps from e.g. {1->2} to {1=>2}.  This is to avoid conflict with -> for dereferencing.

  • Changed syntax for processes to syntax for references.  So, e.g. type process {int x} becomes ref {int x}.  The motivation for this choice is simply to avoid confusion with OS processes.

  • Changed Wyil bytecode to support various “effective” types (e.g. sets, lists, dictionaries).  These enable more efficient operation across a union of similarly kinded types.  For example, we can index into a list of type [int]|[bool] without having to coerce into a list of type [int|bool].

  • Worked hard to get constraints being expanded properly again.  This is working pretty well now for the most part.

  • Added support for Maven compilation (thanks Lee).