Breaking changes

• removed list:permutationsWithReplacement (deprecated in 4.4.0)
• list:permutations now produces real permutations and not combinations (deprecated in 4.4.0)

Added

• added new macro $gensym, to generate a unique symbol identifier to use in macros
• append, concat, and pop can be used as values
• new ptr command for the debugger, printing the VM pointers (ip, pp, sp)
• compile time arity check when performing a tail call
• string:utf8len to compute the number of codepoints in a string

Changed

• all paths inside if should return a value, when used as an expression. If an else branch is missing, nil will be returned
• new compile time error when trying to use append!, concat!, pop!, @= and @@= as values
• arguments in tail calls are loaded by value and not by reference
• string:ord checks that it get only 1 utf8 character

Breaking changes

• in function calls, the function to call is now always evaluated first
• in function calls, the arguments are now evaluated from left to right

Added

• the bytecode reader can print the argument of a PUSH_RETURN_ADDRESS instruction as a hex number
• new super instruction CALL_SYMBOL_BY_INDEX to optimise a LOAD_FAST_BY_INDEX followed by a CALL

Changed

• instruction counter in the bytecode reader are displayed in hex, and count each instruction instead of each byte
• let / mut / set push a copy of their value when used as expression (instead of an internal reference)

Removed

• removed a nearly never emitted GET_CURRENT_PAGE_ADDR instruction, since it's now always optimised with CALL into a CALL_CURRENT_PAGE instruction
• removed list:size, dict:size, dict:contains, math:even and math:odd since they were deprecated since ArkScript 4.2.0

Deprecations

• list:permutations is deprecated in favor of list:combinations
• list:permutationsWithReplacement is deprecated in favor of list:combinationsWithReplacement

Added

• new debugger commands: stack <n> and locals <n> to print the values on the stack and in the current locals scope
• custom format specifiers for lists:
  • :n to remove surrounding brackets,
  • :c / :nc to use , as a separator instead of ,
  • :l / :nl to use \n as a separator,
  • :?s to format as an escaped quoted string,
  • :s to format as a quoted string
• format can use format specifiers for integers: b, #b, B, #B, c, d, o, x, #x, X, and #X if the argument is an integer
• display a warning to stderr when using a deprecated function/value (checks for @deprecated inside the attached comment of functions / values)

Changed

• pop! can return the removed value
• @= and @@= return the inserted value
• append! and concat! return the modified list
• let, mut and set can return the assigned value
• fix formatter: when the condition of a while loop is on multiple lines, add the right amount of indentation before it

Changed

• runtime type checking errors are on stderr instead of stdout
• runtime exceptions are on stderr instead of stdout

Changed

• VM error outputs are on stderr instead of stdout

Added

• new TAIL_CALL_SELF instruction to take care of tail calls in functions: jumps to address 0 in the current page, and reset the scope

Changed

• error outputs are on stderr instead of stdout

Breaking change

• in macros, len, empty?, head, tail, @ have been renamed to $len, $empty?, $head, $tail and $at. Those versions only work inside macros too, inside of having a weird dichotomy where they sometimes got applied and sometimes not

Added

• apply function: (apply func [args...]), to call a function with a set of arguments stored in a list. Works with functions, closures and builtins
• +, -, *, / and many other operators can now be passed around, like builtins. This now works: (list:reduce [1 2 3] +), where before we would get a compile time error about a "freestanding operator '+'"
• builtin__slice builtin, for strings and lists: (builtin__slice data start end [step=1]) ; this is an experimentation and may be removed in future versions
• arguments of builtin macros are properly type-checked and will now raise runtime errors if the type is incorrect
• -fno-cache cli option to disable the creation of the bytecode cache folder __arkscript__
• in the CLI, file can be - to read code from stdin

Changed

• when using the cli flag -fdump-ir, the IR is dumped in the cache folder

Breaking changes

• assert is no longer an instruction but a builtin
• when comparing values of different types using <, >, <=, >= and =, the result will always be false (it used to rely on the type index)

Added

• added BREAKPOINT instruction
• breakpoints can be placed using (breakpoint) and (breakpoint condition)
• added a debugger that can be triggered on error or on breakpoint by passing -fdebugger to the CLI (see the docs for the debugger)
• diagnostics can now be generated when using State.doString, using Diagnostics::generateWithCode (as the original code must be passed to the diagnostics generator)
• empty? can now take a dict, and returns true if it has no key/value pairs
• len can now work on dictionaries, counting the number of keys

Changed

• changed the runpath of arkscript to look for libArkReactor under its (arkscript's) directory, {arkscript}/bin, {arkscript}/lib, and {arkscript}/../lib
• and and or require valid expressions, so (or 1 (mut x 3)) is no longer valid code, as (mut x 3) doesn't return a value
• (not (dict "a" 2)) now returns false, as not checks if the dict is empty

Added

• the repl prints the output of the last expression it ran
• new super instructions: MUL_BY, MUL_BY_INDEX, MUL_SET_VAL that can do multiplications (and optional storing in vars) in place
• new super instruction: FUSED_MATH, which can fuse 2 to 3 math operations in one go (ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV)
• new LOAD_SYMBOL instruction that avoids creating a reference

Fixed

• the REPL doesn't color import in two colors (red for imp__t and blue for ___or_), it keeps the first color that matched (red for import here)
• page numbers are correctly counted when using the bytecode reader with '--only-names', instead of displaying 0 every time

Changed

• quotes are added around strings in type errors
• disassemble can show a file bytecode
• empty? now accepts nil and returns true for this value
• the REPL adds (repl:history) and (repl:save filename) as builtins
• the REPL attempts to load a file from ARKSCRIPT_REPL_STARTUP environment variable, to preload code
• rename LOAD_SYMBOL and LOAD_SYMBOL_BY_INDEX to LOAD_FAST and LOAD_FAST_BY_INDEX to emphasize they load refs

Fixed

• the formatter was breaking functions' arguments list containing argument attributes on multiple lines for no reason
• the formatter was formatting begin nodes inside conditions badly, putting the { on the same line as the condition, making it hard to know if the condition had then and else nodes or a single multi nodes then node

Changed

• long function calls are split on multiple lines