2024-01-11: Fuzion January Update

In an attempt to solve last month's Advent of Code challenge using Fuzion, a number of improvements of the standard library to improve usability and fix performance issues have been made.

Here is what happened in detail:

• General

  • There will be a talk on Fuzion's JVM backend at FOSDEM on 3rd of February: The Challenges of Running the Fuzion Language Natively on the OpenJDK. We are looking forward to see you there!

• Fuzion language

  • When redefining an inherited feature, it is now enforced that the visibility is not restricted (#2233).

  • Syntax sugar for access to tuple elements now permits using t.0/t.1/... instead of t.values.0/t.values.1/...: One can now use

    t := (3,4)
    say (t.0 + t.1)
            

    instead of

    t := (3,4)
    say (t.values.0 + t.values.1)
            

    (#2392).

• base library

  • io.buffered.read_string now may return io.end_of_file (#2227).

  • ctrie has been moved to the lock_free module (#2238).

  • The monoids all, any, and parity have been added to bool.type (#2287).

  • Many useful features have been made public:

    • ranges like codepoint.ascii #2289,
    • bool.as_option #2309,
    • io.buffered.read_bytes#2332,
    • function composition features like atop, flip, etc. defined in composition#2342,
    • (has_interval.infix ..).upper#2384,
    • String.trim#2374,
    • length and others in java.Array#2395.

  • option now inherits from Sequence (#2291).

  • time.durations.as_string has a fixed width now such that nice looking timing tables are easier to create (#2330).

  • A stack data type using local mutation is available now (#2351).

  • map and flat_map are now features of Sequence that produce a new Sequence. Specific variants for array or list that produce an array or a list have been renamed as map_to_array and map_to_list, etc., resp. (#2317).

  • count and drop were redefined for array backed sequences to achieve O(1) performance (#2337).

  • reverse, map_pairs, fold1, and foldf were added to Sequence (#2341).

  • Unused features were removed from effects.fz (#2352).

  • For debugging of functions, a feature log was added which is like say, but instead of returning unit, it returns its argument (#2297).

  • Output of list.as_string has been improved for empty entries (#2314).

  • Performance improvements for io.stdin and io.buffered.reader (#2343).

  • Pipe operators |>, ||>, |||>, etc. have been added (#2355), so you can now do things like

    (3,4) ||> (+) |> say
            

    which will first destructure the tuple into 3 and 4, then apply infix + to add these and pass the result as an argument to say.

• Front end

  • this.type can now be used inside of the corresponding type feature (#2296).

  • Support for partial application with type parameters has been implemented (#2355). This was required, e.g., for the pipe operator to work with partial application as in

    "Hello" |> say.
            

  • Error output for this-types now uses xyz.this instead of xyz.this.type to match the current syntax (#2356).

  • Fixed type inference for numeric literals wrapped in a lazy value (#2363).

  • Fixed false detection of ambiguous code due to partial applications (#2298).

  • Improved type inference for function argument types (#2316).

  • Mark result clazz of intrinsic constructor as instantiated, this paves part of the way for fzjava integration with the JVM backend (#2394).

• Middle end

  • Reduce recursion depth of CFG and DFA to improve performance and avoid stack overflows (#2338).

  • Fixed null-pointer exceptions and check-condition failures (#2357).

• C back end

  • Enable -fno-omit-frame-pointer by default to enhance debugging (#2373).

Cheers,

--The Fuzion Team.