Nim/changelog.md

v1.6.x - yyyy-mm-dd

Changes affecting backward compatibility

• The configuration subsystem now allows for -d:release and -d:danger to work as expected. The downside is that these defines now have custom logic that doesn't apply for other defines.

Standard library additions and changes

• Added support for parenthesized expressions in strformat

• Fixed buffer overflow bugs in net

• Added sections iterator in parsecfg.

• Make custom op in macros.quote work for all statements.

• On Windows the SSL library now checks for valid certificates. It uses the cacert.pem file for this purpose which was extracted from https://curl.se/ca/cacert.pem. Besides the OpenSSL DLLs (e.g. libssl-1_1-x64.dll, libcrypto-1_1-x64.dll) you now also need to ship cacert.pem with your .exe file.

• Make {.requiresInit.} pragma to work for distinct types.

• Added a macros enumLen for returning the number of items in an enum to the typetraits.nim module.

• prelude now works with the JavaScript target.

• Added ioutils module containing duplicate and duplicateTo to duplicate FileHandle using C function dup and dup2.

• The JSON module can now handle integer literals and floating point literals of arbitrary length and precision. Numbers that do not fit the underlying BiggestInt or BiggestFloat fields are kept as string literals and one can use external BigNum libraries to handle these. The parseFloat family of functions also has now optional rawIntegers and rawFloats parameters that can be used to enforce that all integer or float literals remain in the "raw" string form so that client code can easily treat small and large numbers uniformly.

• Added randState template that exposes the default random number generator. Useful for library authors.

• Added asyncdispatch.activeDescriptors that returns the number of currently active async event handles/file descriptors

• Fixed premature garbage collection in asyncdispatch, when a stack trace override is in place.

Language changes

• nimscript now handles except Exception as e

• The cstring doesn't support []= operator in JS backend.

Compiler changes

• Added unsafeIsolate and extract to std/isolation.

• --hint:CC now goes to stderr (like all other hints) instead of stdout.

• json build instructions are now generated in $nimcache/outFileBasename.json instead of $nimcache/projectName.json. This allows avoiding recompiling a given project compiled with different options if the output file differs.

• --usenimcache (implied by nim r main) now generates an output file that includes a hash of some of the compilation options, which allows caching generated binaries: nim r main # recompiles nim r -d:foo main # recompiles nim r main # uses cached binary nim r main arg1 arg2 # ditto (runtime arguments are irrelevant)

• The style checking of the compiler now supports a --styleCheck:usages switch. This switch enforces that every symbol is written as it was declared, not enforcing the official Nim style guide. To be enabled, this has to be combined either with --styleCheck:error or --styleCheck:hint.

Tool changes