v0.1.0: Shaping up!

Read the Caramel Changelog

🌎 From a Backend to Language

Caramel is starting to take shape, and we'll now refer to it as a language
rather than an OCaml backend to make it a little easier to talk about it.

After all, it isn't really 100% OCaml but a strict subset of it. It doesn't
ship the same standard library or tools.

We also have a new website at: caramel.run

🗫 Community

We've updated our Code of Conduct to the Contributor Covenant
v2.0.

We've opened the Github
Discussions --
drop by and say hi or grab a Discord invite link! 👋

📙 Manual

I've started work on the Caramel Manual where we
have an installation guide, an introduction, a small syntax cheatsheet, some
examples, and a small guide on writing Caramel code that talks to existing
Erlang code.

This is a big work in progress, so if you'd like to help, please reach out!

In the future I'm planning to write guides for how to use Caramel with existing
build systems like Rebar3 or Mix, and include a reference guide to the standard
library.

💅 Caramel Formatter

Caramel now ships a formatter that you can run to make sure your code is always
stylish and you have no more bikesheds. It supports ZERO configuration, so what
you see is what you get.

This is currently just a wrapper around ocamlformat, and all the kudos go to
the amazing team putting that together.

You can use it by calling caramel fmt *.ml and it should work on both .ml
and .mli sources.

It only does in-place formatting.

🧰 Compiler

The compiler has dropped support for several targets, including Core Erlang to
Native, and the default OCaml compilation modes.

It will from now on focus only on taking Caramel sources into runnable Erlang
and Core Erlang code. Over time we will move from Erlang to only Core Erlang
support, to make it easier to reuse Caramel code from Erlang, Elixir, Gleam,
and Hamler.

The additions to the compiler are:

• Replaced unbound vars in specs with wildcards (thanks @ilya-klyuchnikov, PR)
• Keyword atoms are automatically quoted now
• Removed unnecessary compilation steps (thanks @Drup)
• Removed unused object file generation (.cmo)
• Better support for operators like &&, ||, and >=

📚 Standard Library

The standard library has been simplified for contributing to it, and you can now
find it at the top of the repository.

Changes:

• String concatenation now possible with the ^ operator: "yay" ^ "!!!"
• Binary.split/3 to split binary strings
• Erlang.floor/1 to round down floats to integers
• Erlang.list_to_float/1 to parse strings to floats
• Erlang.float_to_list/1 to turn floats into strings
• Erlang.list_to_integer/1 to parse strings to integers
• Erlang.integer_to_list/1 to turn integers into strings
• Lists.foldl/foldr signature has been fixed