[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: jhc-0.7.3

[John Meacham]

It's been a long time coming, but jhc-0.7.3 is here. If you have been
following the darcs repository, there are not a whole lot of new
changes, but there have been substantial fixes since 0.7.2 for those
that use the tarballs or rpms.

  http://repetae.net/computer/jhc/

One of the most important ones is I have begun the process of
standardizing on YAML for all external interfaces that may be useful to
automation, this should make interfacing jhc with external tools written
in any language much easier, and it will prevent me from spending time
trying to invent proprietary formats every time I think of something new
to spit out. right now it is used in 3 places:

 - dumping dependency info with --deps
 - library dumping with --list-libraries -v
 - annotating source code, for inputting to documentation generators via
   --annotate-source

The main place it isn't used yet that I desire too is to replace the
'cabal' library description format with a true YAML file. jhc cabal
files were never quite compatible with cabal ones anyway and naming them
the same thing has been a source of connfusion.


some of the other changes have been:


features:
  - a lot more regression tests, many user submitted bugs are now
    regressions (or fixed)
  - support for using 'mock' to build rpms
  - System.Exit, System.Cmd added to base
  - better compatibility with ghc in some library functions
  - ui improvements in showing progress and errors
  - extended --list-libraries info
  - --deps dependency dumping
  - more francise compatible thanks to patches from droundy
  - more instances for bigger tuples added
  - uses editline if readline not available
  - select libraries by hash as well as version
  - add System.IO.Pipe
  - detect version of gcc needed for cross compiling to windows

performance:
  - storage analysis - a very basic region inference enabled by default
  - deadcode analysis can see through partial applications now
  - profiled and sped up some library routines that were producing
    inellegant core.
  - figure out when top level grin functions call themselves recursively
    and turn them into explicit loops.

bug fixes:
  - do expression in infix
  - fix strict newtype bug
  - U2U bug fixed
  - desugaring inside of list comprehensions fix
  - c generator doesn't mess up on unknown values
  - the compiler version is stored in the cache files, so multiple
    versions of jhc don't clobber each others cache entries
  - Ord instance for lists fixed
  - recursive type synonyms detected properly
  - make sure errno.h is included when errno is referenced
  - don't give a parse error when seeing ghc extensions to INLINE
  - qualified method names fix

        John


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/