Factor 0.79 released

Sunday, November 6, 2005

Factor 0.79 is now out after two months of development.

Incompatible changes:

The ifte combinator has been renamed to if.

Syntax changes:

{ 1 2 3 }                ! arrays
V{ 1 2 3 }               ! vectors
H{ [[ key value ]] ... } ! hashtables
C{ 1.02 -7.44 }          ! complex numbers
T{ class slots ... }     ! tuple

Compiler:
- New basic block optimizer performs more aggressive dead load and store elimination.
- Stack shuffles are compiled more efficiently.
- Pushing literals on either side of a stack shuffle is now compiled more efficiently.
- Fixed a problem with relocation of compiled code on PowerPC.
- Fixed various FFI issues on Mac OS X.
User interface:
- Graphics rendering is now done using OpenGL and text rendering is done via FreeType. SDL_gfx and SDL_ttf libraries are no longer required.
- Added expandable outliners. Used by the inspector, .s, usage., uses., vocabs., and various other words.
- Added word completion to the listener pane; press TAB.
- Added word navigation shortcuts to the listener pane; press C+LEFT and C+RIGHT to move a word at a time, and C+BACKSPACE and C+DELETE to delete the previous and next word, respectively.
- Added mouse-over help for presentations.
- Previously-entered output is now clickable in the listener.
- New, better-looking widget theme.
Collections:
- Faster map, 2each and 2map.
- Arrays are now better supported and should be used instead of vectors where resizing is not desired.
- Some new sequence words that do not bounds check: nth-unsafe and set-nth-unsafe. These should only be used in special circumstances, such as inner loops (each, map and so on use them).
- New replace-slice ( new from to seq -- seq ) word replaces a slice of a sequence with another sequence.
- Hashtables did not obey the rule that equal objects must have equal hashcodes, so using hashtables as hashtable keys did not work.
- New mismatch ( seq seq -- i ) word returns first index where two sequences differ, or -1 if they have equal elements.
- New drop-prefix ( seq seq -- seq seq ) word returns a pair of sequences which have the same elements as the two input sequences, with the common prefix removed.

Everything else:

On Mac OS X, signal 11 errors caused by stack under/overflow no longer trigger the OS X crash reporter dialog.
Easier exception handling. The cleanup ( try cleanup -- ) word encapsulates the following idiom:
```
[ A ] [ B rethrow ] catch
[ A ] [ B ] cleanup
```
The recover ( try recover -- ) word encapsulates the following idiom:
```
[ A ] [ [ B ] when* ] catch
[ A ] [ B ] recover
```
The catch ( try -- error/f ) word no longer takes a quotation that receives the error caught; rather, it just pushes the error that was caught on the stack. That is, the old way:
```
[ A ] [ B ] catch
```
Becomes:
```
[ A ] catch B
```
However, most uses of catch can be replaced by cleanup and recover.
The distinct t type is gone. Now, the t object is just a symbol.
A new with-server ( port ident quot -- ) combinator takes care of listening on a network socket, logging client connections, spawning client handler threads, and error handling. The quotation is called for each client, in a new scope with the client socket as the default stream.
New 1+, 1- words are a bit faster than 1 + and 1 - since there is one less generic dispatch involved.
On Windows, FFI errors would raise a signal 11 instead of reporting a nice message.

Contributed code:

The HTTP server and client has been moved from library/httpd/ to library/contrib/.
Intel 8080 CPU and Space Invaders emulator in contrib/space-invaders (Chris Double)
AOL Instant Messenger chat client library in contrib/aim (Doug Coleman)
Cairo graphics library binding in contrib/cairo. (Sampo Vuori)
Advanced math library with quaternions, matrices, polynomials, statistics and various functions in contrib/math/. (Doug Coleman)
Dimensioned units in contrib/units/. (Doug Coleman)
X11 binding in contrib/x11/ (Eduardo Cavazos)