[GeSHi-devel] Upcoming release needs testing and other recent events

[Benny B. <Ben...@gm...>]

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Hi developers, hi community,

two months have passed since the previous version of GeSHi was released 
and there has been lots of activity on the SVN lately. There have been 
added loads of features and other major improvements in the code. But 
one thing after the other.

First off milianw joined the team of developers that actively help 
improving the performance of GeSHi and reduce the memory usage. He also 
helps me with memory profiling and some other tasks. Thank you for the 
great work already done and that yet to be done! He also helps with 
implementation and optimization of various features including string 
highlighting, strict block highlighting and some other feature that was 
just added to this new version: Regular Expressions for Comment 
filtering (or short: Comment RegExps ;-)).

You might wonder, what Comment Regexps could be good for: Well quite a 
lot of things and browsing the changelog of the latest trunk you might 
have come across of some examples. But first: What's that doing: Comment 
Regexps is basically a work around for quite some older bugs that where 
caused when e.g. a perl regexp contained a character denoting the begin 
of a string, or a regular expression (e.g. in bash for environment 
variables) could contain a character that marked the start of a comment. 
The way Comment Regexps solve that issues is by hiding such offending 
input from the comment and string handling and instead processing the 
block as regular expression with only one style (highlighted as 
multiline comment). Sounds trivial, but has a lot of potential.

One of the more obvious features that is achieved using comment regexps 
is highlighting of Heredocs for Perl and PHP as well as Nowdocs (sort of 
Heredoc for PHP6).

Another visible change will be for people highlighting Perl and 
JavaScript: Regular expressions should now work in most cases. Although 
I looked up documentation for the exact syntax of perl-style regexps 
there might still be some (I hope only a few) problems with unmatched or 
incorrectly matched expressions. If you encounter such source: Feel free 
to report it, as the regular expressions to match perl-style regexps are 
non-trivial.

A few people may have experienced a bug with Symbol Highlighting that 
was added in the previous 1.0.7.21 release. I apologize for the 
inconveniences that where caused by this problem. A working fix for the 
problem has now been included into 1.0.7.22 which is now fully tested 
and fixes both the semicolon style bug that randomly added ; after some 
symbols and the rarer pipe bug (only reported with bash) that showed 
simular behaviour by inserting |> after some highlighted sources.

While being at the point of visible changes I'd like to announce another 
big change that, starting with the next release, will affect everyone 
without its own custom stylesheet for GeSHi. As the old style for GeSHi 
has been kinda gaudy. Starting with the next release I will rework the 
theme files in respect to the used colors to improve the following points:
- - get more contrast to the background (i.e. darken them a bit)
- - make them more readable
- - reduce the number of different hues used
- - emphasize on highlighting the contents; not showing how many 
different things GeSHi can do with colors.
I hope you like the new scheme, if not I'm still open for suggestions on 
what could be done better, although I won't change stuff just because 
someone dislikes the taste of an specific IDE ;-)

So far for the visible changes, now to the engine. The engine has gotten 
quite some attention in this release. As mentioned above, milianw and me 
have reworked some functions to reduce memory usage and improve on 
highlighting speed. Results we got by doing this indicate that memory 
usage could be reduced by up to 20% and time is pretty much the same 
although it's doing about 20% more work in the same time ;-) But work on 
this is still in progress!

As always there have also been some minor bugfixes and improvements you 
might look up in the changelog. But don't be scared: It's a bit bigger 
than usual this time, as there has been some detail work in the past two 
months.

Although the code has not been frozen yet, I hereby invite you on trying 
out the next release by checking out a working copy of the branch (the 
more stable one) or by retreiving a copy of trunk (might not be working 
at all times, so be patient there). Anything brought to our attention 
before the release will be addressed contemporary.

And now for the closing: There is still some work left in this release 
so code freeze will be Sunday 25th May 22:00 GMT+0200. The actual 
release will be about one week later at  Sunday 1st June.

As always I'm looking forward to your feedback!

Best regards,
BenBE.
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