In this post we report on the Rascal release 0.17.x, which includes all changes since the 0.16.x releases.
Release 0.17.0 - March 16th, 2020
The 0.15.x releases served as daily pre-releases for 0.17.0, while 0.16.x was a stable release which included all patches since 0.10.0. The releases between 0.10.0 and 0.16.0 have mainly been concerned with bootstrapping and minor bugfixes.
The current release 0.17.x is a step towards bootstrapping the Rascal compiler and making the new static checker (type checker) available.
The static checker:
- checks all features of Rascal
- is written in Rascal using the TypePal framework
- is activated on “project clean” and “file save”
- runs for now in the Rascal interpreter and may be slow on bigger projects (this is transitional, so bear with us)
- enables editor features such as hover-help and jump-to-definition in Eclipse, based on the state of the file after the last “save”
- using the Eclipse Preferences: Eclipse > Preferences > Rascal > Enable Rascal Compiler, type checking can be turned on or off
Also in this release significant steps have been made towards Rascal project deployment:
- In RASCAL.MF, Use
Required-Libraries: |lib://myDependency|to declare projects you depend on - Declare a project using
Project-Name: projectNamein RASCAL.MF - The
|lib://name|scheme always resolves to the root of a jar or target folder for a project with that name - Eclipse, maven and Junit use the above information to configure interpreter and compiler search paths correctly
- The starting point is the JVM classpath: every RASCAL.MF file found on this path leads to a loadable library
- IDEs such as Eclipse dynamically resolve
lib://references to respective project’s target folders if so required
Other notable changes:
- all static errors and warnings in the standard library have been resolved
- general code cleanup
- resolved many issues (thanks all for reporting!)
- various performance improvements