Release Notes

Summary of Major Highlights

This release introduces major distributed networking capabilities, rich internet and desktop applications, enhanced system resilience, and runtime refinements:

• Zero-Configuration Network Discovery: Automatic peer discovery and cluster joining over LAN via UDP beacons (link -a), backed by host UDP bindings and the @Net service.

• New Desktop Applications & CLI Tools: Rich GUI additions including Weather, Crypto, World Sun Clock, and News (Hacker News reader), alongside the new curl HTTP client CLI and cluster monitoring command.

• Three-Tier Service Scopes & Persistent System Identity: Clear scoping with * (Global across bridges), @ (System-wide on single machine), and local (per-node) prefixes, anchored by (system-id).

• Resilient Timeouts & Clean Teardown: Standardized mail-read-timeout across all RPC client interfaces to prevent deadlocks, graceful GUI exit down to a pristine state via (pii-exit), and stable network settlement with (net-quiet).

• Core Language & Build Enhancements: Multi-branch implicit progn for if/ifn else bodies, modernized vp-rdef/vp-fdef register binding, streamlined asynchronous CPM pipelines, and quiet builds (*build_verb*).

Desktop Applications & GUI

• Weather App (apps/desktop/weather/app.lisp):

  • Desktop weather forecasting tool consuming wttr.in endpoints through lib/net/http.inc and lib/net/json.inc.

  • Performs asynchronous, non-blocking data acquisition on worker tasks.

  • Displays 2D procedural vector weather icons, weather metric cards, a 3-day forecast view, and quick city buttons with persistent state.

• Crypto Ticker (apps/desktop/crypto/app.lisp):

  • Live cryptocurrency market monitoring consuming Coinranking endpoints.

  • Features real-time 24-hour procedural vector sparkline graphs with smooth curve interpolation and area shading.

  • Calculates 24-hour high/low spreads and persists user settings in crypto.tre.

• World Sun Clock (apps/desktop/sunclock/app.lisp):

  • Visualizes spherical solar ephemeris and cartography on an equirectangular world map.

  • Renders subsolar zenith positioning, solar terminator curves with twilight bands, and day/night state across global continents.

  • Provides sunrise, sunset, solar noon, and day length calculations across world cities.

  • Supports interactive time navigation (-1h, +1h, -1d, +1d, Now) and automated daylight progression animation.

• News Reader (apps/desktop/news/app.lisp):

  • Live Hacker News feed reader with category filtering across Top, Newest, Show HN, Ask HN, and Jobs.

  • Uses master-detail navigation with feed parsing via node-hnapi.herokuapp.com.

  • Renders story summaries and nested discussions using ChrysaLisp's native Md Markdown formatting component.

• Interactive Terminal in GUI Mode:

  • Running ./run.sh -f launches Node 0 with a background TUI terminal beneath the GUI compositor.

  • Integrates native EOF stream termination in PII and TUI layers to enable direct command piping from the host shell (e.g. echo "tests" | ./run.sh -f).

• Multi-Screen Session Configuration:

  • Launch scripts now accept -g <count> to specify the number of GUI sessions, defaulting to 1.

• Graceful GUI Teardown:

  • Selecting Quit in the Logout application cleanly tears down the GUI service via RPC and terminates Node 0, leaving the host pristine.

• Clock & Canvas Enhancements:

  • Updated Clock and reviewed underlying date routines in lib/date/date.inc.

  • Expanded Canvas demo capabilities and added the Opcode canvas demo.

Networking & Distributed Services

• Zero-Configuration Link Auto-Discovery (link -a):

  • Servers started with link -l [port] -a broadcast periodic UDP beacons on port 3334 announcing their TCP listening port.

  • Clients started with link -a listen for peer beacons and automatically negotiate TCP links to join the cluster.

  • Servers run without -a operate in standard manual mode without broadcasting beacons.

• Host UDP Socket Interface:

  • Added non-blocking UDP socket bindings in host PII (host_net_udp_bind, host_net_udp_send, host_net_udp_recv) supporting port reuse and broadcast delivery.

  • Exposed via the Node 0 @Net service through (net-beacon-rpc) and (net-discover-rpc).

• Hierarchical Service Scoping:

  • Service names now follow a three-tier naming convention:

    • * Prefix: Global cluster services across link bridges.

    • @ Prefix: System-wide services shared across nodes on a single host.

    • No Prefix: Node-local services.

• Cluster Inspection Tool (cmd/cluster.lisp):

  • New command inspecting cluster topology, node task counts, memory allocation, stack watermarks, host architectures (cpu/os/abi), and declared services.

  • Supports -v (--verbose) for live probe status and -t (--timeout) for custom probe timeouts.

• HTTP Client CLI (cmd/curl.lisp):

  • Command-line HTTP client supporting request methods (-X), custom headers (-H), request payloads (-d), response headers (-i), head requests (-I), and silent execution (-s).

• Network Link Fragment Unification:

  • Introduced :sys_link :in_frag for shared handling of incoming fragments.

  • Unified :host_net :in to share :sys_mail :in parcel assembly routines.

• Network Settlement Helper:

  • Added (net-quiet [delay_us] [stable_count] [last_cnt]) -> (node_id ...) to verify that node count remains constant across successive intervals before proceeding with distributed tasks.

Kernel & System Infrastructure

• Bounded RPC Mailbox Reads:

  • Introduced (mail-read-timeout mbox [timeout_us]) -> msg | :nil (aliased as mail-timeout-read) in sys/lisp.inc with architecture-scaled defaults.

  • Updated all system client *-rpc functions to use timeouts to prevent unbounded blocking on unresponsive tasks.

• Host Machine Identification:

  • Added (system-id) -> nodeid kernel primitive retrieving the persistent unique host machine identifier.

• PII Process Termination:

  • Added (pii-exit) to allow cooperative shutdown of the host process.

• Bridge Node Cleanup:

  • Removed legacy (lisp-node?) and (cpp-node?) checks in favor of self-hosted system-to-system bridging.

  • Purged obsolete machine-specific cluster test scripts.

Language, Compiler & Build System

• Control Flow Syntax Simplification:

  • if and ifn now support implicit progn evaluation in else branches: (if tst form [else_form ...]) and (ifn tst form [else_form ...]).

  • Updated when and unless macros to leverage this behavior, ensuring both evaluate strictly to :nil when their condition is not met.

• Register Binding Macro Cleanup:

  • vp-rdef and vp-fdef now expand cleanly to standard bind forms with &ignore support, simplifying register extraction.

• Orthogonal CPM Asynchronous Pipeline:

  • Restructured the asynchronous CPM image loading/saving pipeline into a streamlined, composable stage-based model.

• Quiet Compilation Mode:

  • Added the *build_verb* configuration setting (defaulting to 0) to suppress compilation output.

  • Verbose diagnostic output can be enabled using make -v 1.