2023-11-03: Fuzion November Update

Here is our Fuzion update for November:

The major change in the last month is that the JVM backend has replaced the interpreter backend when running code on the fuzion-lang.dev website, resulting in much better performance for non-trivial examples.

Most work went into fixing issues in the JVM backend.

Here is what happened in detail:

• Fuzion language

  • The syntax for a routine with an explicit result type now uses => (#2037) as in

    
        the_answer u8 => 42
              

• Front end

  • An error is now produced if actual type parameters do not meet the constraints given for the formal type parameter (#1054, (#1818).

  • Improved type inference for empty arrays (#1899, (#21248) enabling code like the following:

    
      a =>
        if true
          []
        else
          [3]
              

• JVM back end

  • Added support for concur.spawn (#2038) and concur.atomic (#2036).

  • Improved stack trace printing in case of precondition failure (#2049).

  • Improved stack overflow handling, now shows Fuzion stack trace (#2060).

  • Added support for tail recursion optimization (#2051).

  • Added checks to avoid accidental modification of immutable arrays by intrinsic functions (#2099).

  • Added support for memory mapping of files (#2126).

  • The JVM backend is now enabled when running the tests, a build fails if the JVM backend fails to run the tests (#2149).

• C back end

  • Improved support for concur.atomic to support compare-and-swap for choice and value types and avoid accessing uninitialized memory (#2123).

• base library

  • A set of features for function composition was added which is a start towards providing a framework for function composition (#2046, #2047).

  • Added io.buffered.reader effect (#1554).

  • The base library type void is now implemented as an empty choice type (#1962). Also added default identity features id with one argument, that is return, and with no argument, that returns a unary identity function.

  • Several visibility fixes (#2157, #2152).

Cheers,

--The Fuzion Team.