v0.4.0

[0.4.0] - 2024-03-30. The Easter Egg release. 🥚

• The fourth public release of Perlang. The most significant change in this release is the introduction of (experimental) AOT-compiled mode, where your Perlang programs are transformed on-the-fly to native binaries. At the moment, experimental compilation is only supported on Linux. Enable it using one of the following means:

  • PERLANG_EXPERIMENTAL_COMPILATION=true (environment variable)
  • ~/.perlang_experimental_compilation (an empty file)

  Once this is done, running perlang <program.per> should compile the program to a native binary automatically and then run the binary instead of running it using the Perlang interpreter. If you are curious, you can look at program.cc to see its intermediate C++ representation. (This intermediate representation is a temporary implementation detail; the long-term plan is to compile straight to native code using LLVM.)

  To follow the development of the experimental compilation mode more in detail, please see issue [#406].

• For more details on how to install Perlang on your own machine, see
  https://perlang.org/download/.

• All changes below were made by @perlun

Added

Experimental compilation

• Add C++-based stdlib project [#407]
• Add first steps towards experimental compiler [#409]
• Preserve exact floating point representation [#412]
• Add BigInt support for compiled mode [#418]
• Initial support for ** operator in compiled mode [#420]
• Use correct error message for unsupported operand types [#421]
• Support ** for BigInt values [#422]
• Replace BigInt lib with libtommath implementation [#425]
• Run more tests in compiled mode [#427]
• Implement modulo operator for BigInt [#432]
• Support << and >> for bigint in compiled mode [#440]
• Detect stdlib bundled with Perlang binaries [#444]
• Include stdlib in Linux-based .tar.gz snapshots [[#445][445]]

Changed

Data types

• Implement AsciiString for ASCII-only strings [#377]
• Implement Utf8String for strings with non-ASCII content [#385]
• Use better format in float and double conversion to string [#414]

General

• Enable nullability checks for the Program class [#386]
• Use Perlang strings and native C functions for writing to stdout [#389]

Maintenance

• Bump TngTech.ArchUnitNET.xUnit from 0.5.0 to 0.10.5 [#366]
• Bump xunit from 2.4.1 to 2.4.2 [#369]
• Bump JetBrains.Annotations from 2020.2.0-eap to 2022.3.1 [#374]
• Remove Moq dependency [#380]
• Bump Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk from 17.4.1 to 17.9.0 [#426]
• Bump Microsoft.CodeAnalysis from 4.4.0 to 4.8.0 [#428]
• Bump coverlet.collector from 1.3.0 to 6.0.1 [#430]
• Bump FluentAssertions from 6.10.0 to 6.12.0 [#434]
• Bump xunit.runner.visualstudio from 2.4.5 to 2.5.7 [#437]
• Bump xunit from 2.4.2 to 2.7.0 [#438]
• Bump TngTech.ArchUnitNET.xUnit from 0.10.5 to 0.10.6 [#442]
• Bump coverlet.collector from 6.0.1 to 6.0.2 [#443]

Fixed

• Make int == double use value-type semantics [#413]

Tests

• Minor test improvements [#410]
• Add bigint < double test [#433]