The Acton programming language Files

Added

• Acton Vim plugin for syntax highlighting & indent, see https://github.com/actonlang/vim-acton
• Add crypto.hash.md5 module for MD5 hashing
• supports incremental updates and one-shot
• Add bytes.from_hex() & bytes.hex() for hex encoding/decoding of bytes
• Add .str_ms() to time.Duration
• Add max_def and min_def functions that require a default argument
• Unlike max() & min(), these functions require a default value that is returned when the input iterable is empty
  • max_def([1, 2, 3], -1) returns 3
  • max_def([], -1) returns -1
• Add re.split() function to split strings based on regular expressions
• re.split(" +", "a b c") returns ["a", "b", "c"]
• Add support for golden testing in the testing module
• Test functions can return a str to be compared against stored golden values
• acton test will show actual vs expected golden value
• Golden values are stored in test/golden/MODULE/TEST_NAME
• Update expected values with --golden-update
• Unmangle actor class names in logging
• Add --no-threads option to compile single-threaded applications
• Set minimum thread stack size to 8MB to avoid stack overflows
• Add better documentation for integer types in the guide
• Add __name__ variable containing current module name
• Add complex.from_real_imag() function to create complex numbers
• Add support for complex numbers as dictionary keys
• Add proper implementation of the Logical protocol for integers
• Add URI parsing module for handling HTTP URLs and other URIs
• Add --list-imports option to actonc to show imported modules
• Add a ConsoleSink to the logging module
• Capture log messages in tests for easier troubleshooting
• Add diff module for comparing strings
• Support for unified diff format with customizable context headers and colors
• Add GitHub Action to create new releases automatically
• Add support for ALPN (Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation) in TLS

Changed

• Dict & Mapping methods get and pop now return None when key is not found, instead of throwing KeyError
• Use new get_def & pop_def for explicit default values
• Automatic backtrace printing on crashes disabled on non-Linux platforms
• LLDB on MacOS often hangs, so automatic backtrace printing is disabled
• Make module paths in type error messages clickable for easier navigation
• Improve RunProcess handling to properly await EOF for stdout/stderr
• Disable garbage collection during package upgrade operations to improve performance
• Silence build lock messages for dependency builds to reduce output noise
• Use development mode (--dev) to build dependencies in test command
• Don't store protocol witnesses in class attributes, push further into methods instead
• Upgrade tlsuv library to v0.33.4 for improved TLS support
• Enhance package dependency handling with support for transitive dependencies
• Use a global dependencies directory in ~/.cache for better dependency management
• Improve testing output with deduplication of stdout/stderr messages
• Colorize error messages for better readability
• Reintroduce --tempdir option to actonc for manual control of temporary files
• Allow integers to overflow for fixed-size integer types (i16, i32, i64, etc.)
• Use diff for golden testing when outputs don't match
• Rename common.mk to version.mk to better reflect its purpose
• Make del operator idempotent for lists and dictionaries

Fixed

• Fix type conversion between u16 and int
• Fix XML default namespace parsing
• Fix error handling in process actor
• Process signals are now ignored if process has exited
• Better error handling around stdin/stdout/stderr operations
• Fix volatile variables in try-except blocks to avoid compiler optimization issues impacting control flow
• Fix string format in time.DateTime's RFC1123 format (month was off by one)
• Improve error messages with better source location information
• Added location details for "Missing constraint" errors
• Added location details for "missing tuple component" errors
• Better error reporting when class method's first parameter doesn't match Self type
• Fix dictionary iteration in relation context
• Fix constructor functions for bounded integer types
• Fix CPS transformation for nested lambdas with preprocessing requirements
• Fix handling of main project local dependency overrides
• Fix zip() function implementation
• Fix left shift operator (<<) for integers
• Fix XML encoding to properly handle UTF-8
• Fix TCP connection close to properly mark socket as invalid
• Fix hash function to avoid signed overflow undefined behavior
• Fix depth subtyping for builtin collections (list, dict, set)
• Fix discovery of root actor based on name
• Fix acton test --name to correctly filter tests by name
• Fix string allocation in B_str to properly account for byte length
• Fix package upgrade correctness
• Fix handling of XML comments during parsing
• Fix main project dependencies in build.zig.zon
• Fix polarity improvement handling in type solver
• Fix exception handling in iterate-relation context
• Fix free() behavior (now a no-op in GC environment)
• Fix race condition in actor waiting queue operations
• Optimize f-string parsing for better performance

Testing / CI

• Add macos-aarch64 tip release build
• Stop testing on Ubuntu 18.04
• Install gdb in test-app environment for better crash analysis
• Separate caches for Acton build and Stack/GHC in CI to avoid cache thrashing
• Add caching for Linux ARM64 builds to improve CI speed
• Ensure uniqueness of test artifact names to prevent collisions
• Add support for Linux on ARM64 (aarch64) in CI
• Add test of respnet (a real-world Acton application) to CI
• Add testing on Ubuntu 24.04 for ARM64
• Use artifact upload/download v4 for better performance
• Add tests for all compiler passes
• Await cache cleaning to avoid race conditions