tame/RELEASES.md

TAME Release Notes

This file contains notes for each release of TAME since v17.4.0.

TAME uses semantic versioning. Any major version number increment indicates that backwards-incompatible changes have been introduced in that version. Each such version will be accompanied by notes that provide a migration path to resolve incompatibilities.

TAME developers: Add new changes under a "NEXT" heading as part of the commits that introduce the changes. To make a new release, run tools/mkrelease, which will handle updating the heading for you.

v18.0.0 (2021-06-23)

This release focuses primarily on compiler optimizations that affect runtime performance (both CPU and memory). The classification system has undergone a rewrite, but the new system is gated behind a template-based feature flag _use-new-classification-system_ (see Core below). Many optimizations listed below are not affected by this toggle.

Compiler

• Numerous compiler optimizations including (but not limited to):
  • Classification system rewrite with significant correctness and performance improvements, with significantly less generated code.
    • There is more work to be done in TAMER.
    • This change is gated behind a feature toggle (see _use-new-classification-system_ in Core below).
  • Significant reduction in byte count of JavaScript target output.
  • Classifications with single-TRUE predicate matches are aliases and now compile more efficiently.
  • Classifications that are a disjunction of conjunctions with a common predicate will have the common predicate hoisted out, resulting in more efficeint code generation.
  • Classifications with equality matches entirely on a single param are compiled into a Set lookup.
  • Most self-executing functions in target JavaScript code have been eliminated, resulting in a performance improvement.
  • Floating point truncation now takes place without using toFixed in JavaScript target, eliminating expensive number->string->number conversions.
  • Code paths are entirely skipped if a calculation predicate indicates that it should not be executed, rather than simply multiplying by 0 after performing potentially expensive calculations.
  • A bunch of wasteful casting has been eliminated, supplanted by proper casting of param inputs.
  • Unnecessary debug output removed, significantly improving performance in certain cases.
  • Single-predicate any/all blocks stripped rather than being extracted into separate classifications.
  • Extracted any/all classifications are inlined at the reference site when the new classification system is enabled, reducing the number of temporaries created at runtime in JavaScript.
• Summary Page now displays values of lv:match/@on instead of debug values.
  • This provides more useful information and is not subject to the confusing reordering behavior of the compiler that is not reflected on the page.
  • Changes that have not yet been merged will remove debug values for the classification system.

Core

• New feature flag template _use-new-classification-system_.
  • This allows selectively enabling code generation for the new classification system, which has BC breaks in certain buggy situations. See core/test/core/class package for more information.
• Remove core/aggregate.
  • This package is not currently utilized and is dangerous---it could easily aggregate unintended values if used carelessly. Those who know what they are doing can use sym-set if such a thing is a good thing within the given context, and proper precautions are taken (as many templates already do today).

Rust

• Version bump from 1.42.0 to 1.48.0 now that intra-doc links has been stabalized.

Miscellaneous

• build-aux/progtest-runner will now deterministically concatenate files based on name rather than some unspecified order.

v17.9.0 (2021-05-27)

This is a documentation/design release, introducing The TAME Programming Language in design/tpl.

Compiler

• Allow the mapping of flag values from program.xml.

Design

• Introduce The TAME Programming Language.

v17.8.1 (2021-03-18)

This release contains a bufix for recent build changes in v17.8.0 that were causing, under some circumstances, builds to fail during dependency generation. It also contains minor improvements and cleanup.

Build System

• [bugfix] Lookup tables will no longer build rater/core/vector/table when geneating the xml package.
  • This was causing problems during suppliers.mk dependency generation. The dependency is still in place for the corresponding xmlo file.
  • This was broken by v17.8.0.
• Minor improvements to tame and tamed scripts to ensure that certain unlikely failures are not ignored.

v17.8.0 (2021-02-23)

This release contains changes to the build system to accommodate liza-proguic's introduction of step-based packages (in place of a monolithic package-dfns.xml), as well as miscellaneous improvements.

Compiler

• rater.xsd, used for certain validations of TAME's grammar, has been updated to an out-of-tree version; it had inadvertently gotten out of date, and the discrepency won't happen again in the future.
  • Further, limits on the length of @yields identifiers have been removed; the lack of namespacing and generation of identifiers from templates can yield longer identifier names.

Build System

• Only modify .version.xml timestamp when hash changes. This allows its use as a dependency without forcefully rebuilding each and every time.
• configure will no longer immediately generate suppliers.mk.
  • Additionally, build-aux/suppmk-gen, which configure directly invoked until now, was removed in favor of generic rules in Makefile.am.
• Step-level imports in program definitions are now recognized to accommodate liza-proguic's step-level package generation.
• Step-level program packages are now properly accounted for as dependencies for builds.
• supplier.mk is now automatically regenerated when source files change. This previously needed to be done manually when imports changed.
  • supplier.mk generation will no longer be verbose (it'll instead be only one line), which makes it more amenable to more frequent regeneration.

v17.7.0 (2020-12-09)

This release provides tail-call optimizations aimed at the query system in core.

Compiler

• [bugfix] Recursive calls using TCO will wait to overwrite their function arguments until all expressions calculating the new argument values have completed.

tame-core

• mrange is now fully tail-recursive and has experimental TCO applied.
  • It was previously only recursive for non-matching rows.

v17.6.5 (2020-12-03)

This release improves Summary Page performance when populating the page with data loaded from an external source.

Summary Page

• Populating the DOM with loaded data now runs in linear time.

v17.6.4 (2020-11-23)

This release tolerates invalid map inputs in certain circumstances.

Compiler

• Tolerate non-string inputs to uppercase and hash map methods.

v17.6.3 (2020-11-03)

• Update the CDN used to get MathJax.

v17.6.2 (2020-10-01)

• Optionally include a "program.mk" file if it is present in the project's root directory. This allows us to move program specific tasks outside of TAME.

v17.6.1 (2020-09-23)

Compiler

• lv:param-class-to-yields will now trigger a failure rather than relying on propagating bad values, which may not result in failure if the symbol is represented by another type (non-class) of object.

Miscellaneous

• package-lock.json additions.

v17.6.0 (2020-08-19)

This release provides a new environment variable for JVM tuning. It does not provide any new compiler features or performance enhancements in itself, though it enables optimizations through JVM tuning.

Compiler

• The new environment variable TAMED_JAVA_OPTS can now be used to provide arguments to the JVM. This feature was added to support heap ratio tuning.

Miscellaneous

• build-aux/lsimports was causing Gawk to complain about the third argument to gensub; fixed.
• bootstrap will test explicitly whether hoxsl is a symbol link, since -e fails if the symlink is broken.

v17.5.0 (2020-07-15)

This release adds support for experimental human-guided tail call optimizations (TCO) to resolve issues of stack exhaustion during runtime for tables with a large number of rows after having applied the first predicate. This feature should not be used outside of tame-core, and will be done automatically by TAMER in the future.

tame-core

• vector/filter/mrange, used by the table lookup system, has had its mutually recursive function inlined and now uses TCO.
  • This was the source of stack exhaustion on tables whose predicates were unable to filter rows sufficiently.

Compiler

• Experimental guided tail call optimizations (TCO) added to XSLT-based compiler, allowing a human to manually indicate recursive calls in tail position.
  • This is undocumented and should only be used by tame-core. The experimental warning will be removed in future releases if the behavior proves to be sound.
  • TAMER will add support for proper tail calls that will be detected automatically.

v17.4.3 (2020-07-02)

This release fixes a bug caused by previous refactoring that caused unresolved externs to produce an obscure and useless error for the end user.

Linker

• Provide useful error for unresolved identifiers.
  • This was previously falling through to an unreachable! block, producing a very opaque and useless internal error message.

v17.4.2 (2020-05-13)

This release adds GraphML output for linked objects to allow us to inspect the graph.

Linker

• Add --emit oprion to tamer/src/bin/tameld.rs that allows us to specify the type of output we want.
• Minor refactoring.

Miscellaneous

• Added make target to build linked GraphML files.
• Updated make *.xmle target to explicitly state it is emitting xmle.
• Added Cypher script to use in Neo4J after a GraphML file is imported.
• RELEASES.md
  • Add missing link to semver.org.
  • Fix tame-core heading, which was erroneously Org-mode-styled.
  • Rephrase and correct formatting of an introduction paragraph.

v17.4.1 (2020-04-29)

This release refactors the linker, adds additional tests, and improves errors slightly. There are otherwise no functional changes.

Compiler

• Refactor proof-of-concept dependency graph construction code.
• Improvements to error abstraction which will later aid in reporting.

Miscellaneous

• RELEASES.md added.
• tools/mkrelease added to help automate updating RELEASES.md.
• build-aux/release-check added to check releases.
  • This is invoked both by tools/mkrelease and by CI via .gitlab-ci.yml on tags.

v17.4.0 (2020-04-17)

This release focuses on moving some code out of the existing XSLT-based compiler so that the functionality does not need to be re-implemented in TAMER. There are no user-facing changes aside form the introduction of two new templates, which are not yet expected to be used directly.

tame-core

• New rate-each template to replace XSLT template in compiler.
• New yields template to replace XSLT template in compiler.
• Users should continue to use rate-each and yields as before rather than invoking the new templates directly.
  • The intent is to remove the t namespace prefix in the future so that templates will be applied automatically.

Compiler

• XSLT-based compiler now emits t:rate-each in place of the previous XSLT template.
• XSLT-based compiler now emits t:yields in place of the previous XSLT template.