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2011-07-10 Version 0.8.12 released

Version 0.8.12 has been released! Get it here.

Bugfixes

• Bugfix: httpclient correct passes the path starting with /.
• Bugfixes for the htmlparser module.
• Bugfix: pegs.find did not respect start parameter.
• Bugfix: dialogs.ChooseFilesToOpen did not work if only one file is selected.
• Bugfix: niminst: nimrod is not default dir for every project.
• Bugfix: Multiple yield statements in iterators did not cause local vars to be copied.
• Bugfix: The compiler does not emit very inaccurate floating point literals anymore.
• Bugfix: Subclasses are taken into account for try except matching.
• Bugfix: Generics and macros are more stable. There are still known bugs left though.
• Bugfix: Generated type information for tuples was sometimes wrong, causing random crashes.
• Lots of other bugfixes: Too many to list them all.

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• Operators starting with ^ are now right-associative and have the highest priority.
• Deprecated os.getApplicationFilename: Use os.getAppFilename instead.
• Deprecated os.getApplicationDir: Use os.getAppDir instead.
• Deprecated system.copy: Use substr or string slicing instead.
• Changed and documented how generalized string literals work: The syntax module.re"abc" is now supported.
• Changed the behaviour of strutils.%, ropes.% if both notations $# and $i are involved.
• The pegs and re modules distinguish between replace and replacef operations.
• The pointer dereference operation p^ is deprecated and might become ^p in later versions or be dropped entirely since it is rarely used. Use the new notation p[] in the rare cases where you need to dereference a pointer explicitely.
• system.readFile does not return nil anymore but raises an EIO exception instead.
• Unsound co-/contravariance for procvars has been removed.

Language Additions

• Source code filters are now documented.
• Added the linearScanEnd, unroll, shallow pragmas.
• Added emit pragma for direct code generator control.
• Case statement branches support constant sets for programming convenience.
• Tuple unpacking is not enforced in for loops anymore.
• The compiler now supports array, sequence and string slicing.
• A field in an enum may be given an explicit string representation. This yields more maintainable code than using a constant array[TMyEnum, string] mapping.
• Indices in array literals may be explicitly given, enhancing readability: [enumValueA: "a", enumValueB: "b"].
• Added thread support via the threads core module and the --threads:on command line switch.
• The built-in iterators system.fields and system.fieldPairs can be used to iterate over any field of a tuple. With this mechanism operations like == and hash are lifted to tuples.
• The slice .. is now a first-class operator, allowing code like: x in 1000..100_000.

Compiler Additions

• The compiler supports IDEs via the new group of idetools command line options.
• The interactive mode (REPL) has been improved and documented for the first time.
• The compiler now might use hashing for string case statements depending on the number of string literals in the case statement.

Library Additions

• Added lists module which contains generic linked lists.
• Added sets module which contains generic hash sets.
• Added tables module which contains generic hash tables.
• Added queues module which contains generic sequence based queues.
• Added intsets module which contains a specialized int set data type.
• Added scgi module.
• Added smtp module.
• Added encodings module.
• Added re.findAll, pegs.findAll.
• Added os.findExe.
• Added parseutils.parseUntil and parseutils.parseWhile.
• Added strutils.align, strutils.tokenize, strutils.wordWrap.
• Pegs support a captured search loop operator {@}.
• Pegs support new built-ins: \letter, \upper, \lower, \title, \white.
• Pegs support the new built-in \skip operation.
• Pegs support the $ and ^ anchors.
• Additional operations were added to the complex module.
• Added strutils.formatFloat, strutils.formatBiggestFloat.
• Added unary < for nice looking excluding upper bounds in ranges.
• Added math.floor.
• Added system.reset and a version of system.open that returns a TFile and raises an exception in case of an error.
• Added a wrapper for redis.
• Added a wrapper for 0mq via the zmq module.
• Added a wrapper for sphinx.
• Added system.newStringOfCap.
• Added system.raiseHook and system.outOfMemHook.
• Added system.writeFile.
• Added system.shallowCopy.
• system.echo is guaranteed to be thread-safe.
• Added prelude include file for scripting convenience.
• Added typeinfo core module for access to runtime type information.
• Added marshal module for JSON serialization.

2010-10-20 Version 0.8.10 released

Bugfixes

• Bugfix: Command line parsing on Windows and os.parseCmdLine now adheres to the same parsing rules as Microsoft's C/C++ startup code.
• Bugfix: Passing a ref pointer to the untyped pointer type is invalid.
• Bugfix: Updated keyval example.
• Bugfix: system.splitChunk still contained code for debug output.
• Bugfix: dialogs.ChooseFileToSave uses STOCK_SAVE instead of STOCK_OPEN for the GTK backend.
• Bugfix: Various bugs concerning exception handling fixed.
• Bugfix: low(somestring) crashed the compiler.
• Bugfix: strutils.endsWith lacked range checking.
• Bugfix: Better detection for AMD64 on Mac OS X.

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• Reversed parameter order for os.copyFile and os.moveFile!!!
• Procs not marked as procvar cannot only be passed to a procvar anymore, unless they are used in the same module.
• Deprecated times.getStartMilsecs: Use epochTime or cpuTime instead.
• Removed system.OpenFile.
• Removed system.CloseFile.
• Removed strutils.replaceStr.
• Removed strutils.deleteStr.
• Removed strutils.splitLinesSeq.
• Removed strutils.splitSeq.
• Removed strutils.toString.
• If a DLL cannot be loaded (via the dynlib pragma) EInvalidLibrary is not raised anymore. Instead system.quit() is called. This is because raising an exception requires heap allocations. However the memory manager might be contained in the DLL that failed to load.
• The re module (and the pcre wrapper) now depend on the pcre dll.

Additions

• The {.compile: "file.c".} pragma uses a CRC check to see if the file needs to be recompiled.
• Added system.reopen.
• Added system.getCurrentException.
• Added system.appType.
• Added system.compileOption.
• Added times.epochTime and times.cpuTime.
• Implemented explicit type arguments for generics.
• Implemented {.size: sizeof(cint).} pragma for enum types. This is useful for interfacing with C.
• Implemented {.pragma.} pragma for user defined pragmas.
• Implemented {.extern.} pragma for better control of name mangling.
• The importc and exportc pragmas support format strings: proc p{.exportc: "nim_$1".} exports p as nim_p. This is useful for user defined pragmas.
• The standard library can be built as a DLL. Generating DLLs has been improved.
• Added expat module.
• Added json module.
• Added support for a Tiny C backend. Currently this only works on Linux. You need to bootstrap with -d:tinyc to enable Tiny C support. Nimrod can then execute code directly via nimrod run myfile.

2010-03-14 Version 0.8.8 released

Bugfixes

• The Posix version of os.copyFile has better error handling.
• Fixed bug #502670 (underscores in identifiers).
• Fixed a bug in the parsexml module concerning the parsing of <tag attr="value" />.
• Fixed a bug in the parsexml module concerning the parsing of enities like &ltXX.
• system.write(f: TFile, s: string) now works even if s contains binary zeros.
• Fixed a bug in os.setFilePermissions for Windows.
• An overloadable symbol can now have the same name as an imported module.
• Fixed a serious bug in strutils.cmpIgnoreCase.
• Fixed unicode.toUTF8.
• The compiler now rejects '\n' (use "\n" instead).
• times.getStartMilsecs() now works on Mac OS X.
• Fixed a bug in pegs.match concerning start offsets.
• Lots of other little bugfixes.

Additions

• Added system.cstringArrayToSeq.
• Added system.lines(f: TFile) iterator.
• Added system.delete, system.del and system.insert for sequences.
• Added system./ for int.
• Exported system.newException template.
• Added cgi.decodeData(data: string): tuple[key, value: string].
• Added strutils.insertSep.
• Added math.trunc.
• Added ropes module.
• Added sockets module.
• Added browsers module.
• Added httpserver module.
• Added httpclient module.
• Added parseutils module.
• Added unidecode module.
• Added xmldom module.
• Added xmldomparser module.
• Added xmltree module.
• Added xmlparser module.
• Added htmlparser module.
• Added re module.
• Added graphics module.
• Added colors module.
• Many wrappers now do not contain redundant name prefixes (like GTK_, lua). The old wrappers are still available in lib/oldwrappers. You can change your configuration file to use these.
• Triple quoted strings allow for " in more contexts.
• "" within raw string literals stands for a single quotation mark.
• Arguments to openArray parameters can be left out.
• More extensive subscript operator overloading. (To be documented.)
• The documentation generator supports the .. raw:: html directive.
• The Pegs module supports back references via the notation $capture_index.

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• Overloading of the subscript operator only works if the type does not provide a built-in one.
• The search order for libraries which is affected by the path option has been reversed, so that the project's path is searched before the standard library's path.
• The compiler does not include a Pascal parser for bootstrapping purposes any more. Instead there is a pas2nim tool that contains the old functionality.
• The procs os.copyFile and os.moveFile have been deprecated temporarily, so that the compiler warns about their usage. Use them with named arguments only, because the parameter order will change the next version!
• atomic and let are now keywords.
• The \w character class for pegs now includes the digits '0'..'9'.
• Many wrappers now do not contain redundant name prefixes (like GTK_, lua) anymore.
• Arguments to openArray parameters can be left out.

2009-12-21 Version 0.8.6 released

The version jump from 0.8.2 to 0.8.6 acknowledges the fact that all development of the compiler is now done in Nimrod.

Bugfixes

• The pragmas hint[X]:off and warning[X]:off now work.
• Method call syntax for iterators works again (for x in lines.split()).
• Fixed a typo in removeDir for POSIX that lead to an infinite recursion.
• The compiler now checks that module filenames are valid identifiers.
• Empty patterns for the dynlib pragma are now possible.
• os.parseCmdLine returned wrong results for trailing whitespace.
• Inconsequent tuple usage (using the same tuple with and without named fields) does not crash the code generator anymore.
• A better error message is provided when the loading of a proc within a dynamic lib fails.

Additions

• Added system.contains for open arrays.
• The PEG module now supports the search loop operator @.
• Grammar/parser: SAD|IND is allowed before any kind of closing bracket. This allows for more flexible source code formating.
• The compiler now uses a bind table for symbol lookup within a bind context. (See manual.html#templates for details.)
• discard """my long comment""" is now optimized away.
• New --floatChecks: on|off switches and pragmas for better debugging of floating point operations. (See manual.html#pre-defined-floating-point-types for details.)
• The manual has been improved. (Many thanks to Philippe Lhoste!)

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• The compiler does not skip the linking step anymore even if no file has changed.
• os.splitFile(".xyz") now returns ("", ".xyz", "") instead of ("", "", ".xyz"). So filenames starting with a dot are handled differently.
• strutils.split(s: string, seps: set[char]) never yields the empty string anymore. This behaviour is probably more appropriate for whitespace splitting.
• The compiler now stops after the --version command line switch.
• Removed support for enum inheritance in the parser; enum inheritance has never been documented anyway.
• The msg field of system.E_base has now the type string, instead of cstring. This improves memory safety.

2009-10-21 Version 0.8.2 released

Bugfixes

• Passing --hint[X]:off or --warning[X]:off as command line arguments to the compiler now works.
• Default parameters for templates now work.
• Fixed security issue in system.copy.
• String case without an else part generated wrong code.
• Various fixes for the osproc module; it now works on Windows.

Additions

• Implemented multi-methods.
• The compiler now detects the number of available processors and executes the C compiler concurrently. This can be adjusted by the --parallel_build: number_of_processors command line switch.
• PEG-based pattern matching via the pegs module.
• Added system.definedInScope.
• Added system.accumulateResult.
• Added os.walkDirRec.
• Added osproc.countProcessors.
• Added osproc.execProcesses.
• The configuration system now supports $cc.options.linker.
• Merged expr and typeDesc in the grammar/parser: this will allow for anonymous procs without lambda.
• Many scripts have no need for a GC: The new --gc:none command line switch can be used to exclude the GC from the executable.

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• Taking the address of an object discriminant is now invalid.
• Passing a proc to a proc var is only allowed for procs marked with procvar or a calling convention != nimcall. For now this only causes a warning, but this will turn into an error soon.
• system.& and system.add now receive openArray instead of seq parameters.
• Removed strutils.findSubStr and strutils.findChars. They have been deprecated for 3 versions.
• The unicode module uses a distinct type for TRune.
• Deprecated strutils.toString: use $ instead.
• Deprecated os.splitPath: use os.splitPath that returns a tuple instead.
• Deprecated os.extractDir: use splitFile(path).dir instead.
• Deprecated os.splitFilename: use splitFile instead.
• Deprecated os.extractFileExt: use splitFile instead.
• Deprecated os.extractFileTrunk: use splitFile instead.
• Deprecated os.appendFileExt: use os.addFileExt instead.
• Deprecated os.executeShellCommand: use os.execShellCmd instead.
• Deprecated os.iterOverEnvironment: use os.envPairs instead.
• Deprecated parseopt.init: use parseopt.initOptParser instead.
• Deprecated parseopt.getRestOfCommandLine: use parseopt.cmdLineRest instead.
• Deprecated os.pcDirectory: use os.pcDir instead.
• Deprecated os.pcLinkToDirectory: use os.pcLinkToDir instead.
• Deprecated osproc.executeProcess: use osproc.execProcess instead.
• Deprecated osproc.executeCommand: use osproc.execCmd instead.

2009-09-12 Version 0.8.0 released

Bugfixes

• fixed a small bug that caused the compiler to not report unused overloaded symbols
• fixed a small bug concerning symbol overloading
• fixed a typo: it's "ambiguous", not "ambigious" ;-)
• the compiler now detects recursive include files
• system.card should work again
• items for set[char] and array[char, T] should work now

Additions

• implemented generic types and two phase symbol lookup in generic routines
• template parameters can now have real types
• implemented generalized raw string literals: ident"abc" is a shortcut for ident(r"abc")
• in overloading resolution iterators are separated from procs; iterators now can have the same name+signature as procs
• symbol lookup in templates can be affected by the new bind keyword
• the compiler now accepts a --no_main switch for better link interoperability with other compiled languages
• implemented tuple unpacking in var sections
• the code generator emits default: __assume(0); for Visual C++ (for optimization)
• the compiler now checks if a proc has side effects; procs that are declared to have no side effects are rejected if the compiler cannot verify this
• the format operator strutils.% now supports $# for automatic argument counting
• implemented strutils.join

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• two phase symbol lookup is performed in generic routines
• bind is now a reserved word; exception is no reserved word anymore
• abstract types have been renamed to distinct types; thus distinct is now a reserved word; abstract is no reserved word anymore
• system.openFile deprecated: use system.open instead
• system.closeFile deprecated: use system.close instead
• strutils.replaceStr deprecated: use strutils.replace instead
• strutils.deleteStr deprecated: use strutils.delete instead
• strutils.splitSeq deprecated: use strutils.split instead
• strutils.splitLinesSeq deprecated: use strutils.splitLines instead
• strutils.parseFloat does not accept an additional start parameter anymore

Documentation

• the manual has been improved

2009-06-08 Version 0.7.10 released

Nimrod version 0.7.10 has been released!

Bugfixes

• fixed bug #374441, #376113
• the posix module works for Mac OS X again
• returning an array should now work
• fixed a serious bug in several parsers: the cached buf pointer must be updated after a reallocation of the buffer
• fixed a CSS bug that kept Firefox from rendering parts of the generated documentation properly
• fixed a bug concerning evaluation of command statements
• overloading of inc, dec, pred, succ should now work
• removeDir now works as the documentation says: it even removes directories that are not empty

Additions

• zero argument templates/macros can now be invoked without (), because this is not ambiguous
• new modules in the library:
  • dynlib: load symbols from a shared library
  • python: wrapper for the Python programming language
  • tcl: wrapper for the TCL programming language
• added system.max, system.min for open arrays
• added system.each built-in
• added os.getFilePermissions, os.setFilePermissions, os.inclFilePermissions, os.exclFilePermissions
• the dynlib import mechanism now supports a flexible versioning scheme:

  proc Tcl_Eval(interp: pTcl_Interp, script: cstring): int {.cdecl,
    importc, dynlib: "libtcl(8.5|8.4|8.3|8.2|8.1).so.(1|0)".}

• implemented abstract types

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• the organization within the lib folder now reflects the documentation; as a result old configuration files need to be updated
• abstract is now a reserved keyword
• echo is now a built-in macro that accepts a variable numer of arguments of different types (and calls $ for the arguments that need it); as a result it cannot be overloaded anymore
• where is no keyword anymore
• installation on UNIX produces a release version of the compiler

2009-05-08 Version 0.7.8 released

Nimrod version 0.7.8 has been released! Apart from bugfixes and added libraries the biggest change is that Nimrod now has a new memory manager which:

• interacts much better with the GC
• uses less memory
• is faster than the old memory manager (dlmalloc)
• releases memory back to the operating system

Bugfixes

• generics are now processed earlier in the pipeline; thus generics can be used within macros
• changed bootstrapping in koch.py and boot.nim to fix bug #369607
• the compiler now checks that yield is used inside a loop
• fixed a bug in the evaluation code for system.len, system.setlen and system.newSeq
• overflow checking for newSeq fixes a security issue

Additions

• new module: parsecsv for parsing CSV files
• new module: xmlgen for generating XML or HTML
• new module: osproc for OS process communication
• added math.TRunningStat object and its methods
• added strutils.validIdentifier
• the reStructuredText parser now supports the container directive that translates to the HTML div element
• the cgi module registers a handler, so that stack traces contain the HTML <br /> element making CGI applications easier to debug
• added the cgi.decodeData iterator
• copy and newString can now be evaluated at compile time. As a result more procedures from the strutils module can be evaluated at compile time.
• macros.error now prints a stack trace
• Nimrod now supports the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector: The --gc:boehm command line switch activates it. However, the native Nimrod collector is faster!

Documentation

• Nimrod's abstract syntax trees are now documented in the macros module. Unfortunately the documentation is still incomplete.

2009-04-22 Version 0.7.6 released

Nimrod version 0.7.6 has been released! This is mostly a bugfix release. Some new features and libraries have also been implemented.

Bugfixes

• installation on Windows Vista may now work out of the box; please try!
• fixed a bug that kept the "recursive modules" example from working
• mixing named and unnamed parameters in a procedure call now works
• octal numbers with the prefix 0c are now properly supported
• enumerations now may start with negative values
• parseInt, ParseBiggestInt now throw an exception if the string does not end after the parsed number
• the compiler now handles top-level statements correctly
• generated nimcache directory never ends in a slash
• createDir now works for global directories under UNIX ("/somepath/here")
• the compiler now executes the executable with a leading "./" under UNIX
• the compiler now supports constant arrays of procedure pointers
• elif in case statements now works
• iterators using an open array parameter now work
• fixed a bug where in some contexts $myEnum did not work

Additions

• implemented the passing of a code-block to the last parameter of a template/macro:

  template withFile(f, filename, mode: expr,
                    actions: stmt): stmt =
    block:
      var f: TFile
      if openFile(f, filename, mode):
        try:
          actions
        finally:
          closeFile(f)
      else:
        quit("cannot open: " & filename)
  
  withFile(txt, "ttempl3.txt", fmWrite):
    txt.writeln("line 1")
    txt.writeln("line 2")

• new pragma deprecated can be used to mark deprecated identifiers
• added system.pop built-in for sequences
• added addf, addSep and validEmailAddress to the strutils module
• nice =~ template operator for the regexprs module
• the scoping rules for for, while, if, case changed in a subtle way to support the new =~ template
• added common regular expressions for regexprs
• posix module now declares socket stuff
• new module: cgi for creating CGI applications
• new module: terminal for simple terminal output customization
• new module: parsexml for HTML/XML parsing with some support for parsing dirty HTML
• new module: web for retrieving web pages
• new module: md5 for computation of MD5 checksums
• new wrappers: mysql, sqlite3, libcurl

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• strutils.findSubStr, strutils.findChars deprecated: use strutils.find instead

Documentation

• The library is now divided into pure libraries, impure libraries and wrappers.

2009-01-22 Forum added

We now have a forum where you can discuss Nimrod.

2009-01-07 Version 0.7.4 released

Nimrod version 0.7.4 has been released!

Bugfixes

• installation on Windows should work now if the directory contains spaces
• the documentation generator now only renders documentation comments
• \ is allowed for operators as the manual says
• in rare cases, the index check has been optimized away, even though it would have been necessary
• several bugfixes for tuple types

Additions

• added an unicode module for UTF-8 handling
• added hostOS and hostCPU magics to the system module
• system.echo now accepts multiple arguments
• added optimization: in some cases inlining of iterators now produces substantially better code
• added whole program dead code elimination
• the magic $ operator now works for enumerations
• in const sections advanced compile time evaluation is done:

proc fac(n: int): int =
  if n <= 1: return 1
  else: return n*(fac(n-1))

const
  z = fac(3)  # computes 6 at compile time

Changes affecting backwards compatibility

• renamed in_Operator to contains: in is now a template that translates to contains
• changed strutils.quoteIfSpaceExists to strutils.quoteIfContainsWhite
• the parser is now much more picky about missings commas, etc. If this affects your code too much, try to run your code through the pretty printer.
• the macros API is no longer part of the system module, to use this API you now have to import the macros module

Documentation

• added a tutorial

2008-12-12 Version 0.7.2 released

Nimrod version 0.7.2 has been released! This is a bugfix release. This most important fix is that Nimrod now works again on AMD64 (x86_64) processors. No new features have been implemented.

2008-11-16 Version 0.7.0 released

Nimrod version 0.7.0 has been released! Changes:

• various bug fixes, too many to list them here
• the installation for UNIX-based systems does not depend on Python any longer
• the koch.py script now works with older Python versions (including 1.5.2)
• changed integer operations and conversions rules
• added GC_ref and GC_unref procs
• sequences now need to be constructed with the @ operator. This leads to less ambiguities.
• the compiler now uses less memory and is much faster
• the GC is now much faster
• new bindings: zlib, SDL, Xlib, OpenGL, ODBC, Lua
• the generated C code is much faster to optimize with GCC
• new libraries: streams, zipfiles
• the Nimrod compiler has been ported to FreeBSD: it should work on other BSD's too

2008-08-22 Version 0.6.0 released

Nimrod version 0.6.0 has been released! This is the first version of the compiler that is able to compile itself! A nice side-effect from this is that a source-based installation does not depend on FreePascal any longer.

Changes:

• various bug fixes, too many to list them here
• cleaned up the type system: records are now superfluous and not supported anymore
• improved the performance of the garbage collector
• new modules in the library:
  • parseopt: a simple to use command line parser
  • hashes: efficient computation of hash values
  • strtabs: efficient mapping from strings to strings
  • parsecfg: an efficient configuration file parser
• macros and compile-time evaluation implemented (however, still experimental)
• generics implemented (however, still experimental)