dev-2023-07

New Language Features

• Allowing for Positional and Named Arguments in Procedure Calls details
• #reverse for
• Allow for &e, i in array and for k, &v in map and switch &v in ...
  • Will replace the old style of passing the iterable by pointer
  • The &e value will still be of the same type but will be addressable (a reference to the actual value)
    • Variable Addressing Mode (L-Value in C-speak)

Compiler Improvements

• intrinsics.type_merge
• ODIN_COMPILE_TIMESTAMP (unix timestamp in nanoseconds)
• Default to panic allocator for wasm targets
• Numerous Fixes

New Packages

• New and Improved io.Stream interface - details
• core:math/cmplx
• Font texture atlas builder port of fontstash was added to vendor:fontstash
• Vectorized rendering port of nanovg was added to vendor:nanovg

Package Improvements

• Add math.sincos
• Update to Botan 3.0
• Use C calling convention within most Objective-C related procedures in vendor:darwin packages
• Add loads of @(require_results) to many procedures within core
• Make the vast majority of math procedures "contextless"
• Add Mutex to mem.Tracking_Allocator
• bindFramebuffer was added to WebGL package
• Added self_cleanup flag to properly auto-clean threads
• Correct printing in core:fmt for ODIN_ERROR_POS_STYLE
• General Fixes

dev-2023-05

New Language Features

Compiler Improvements

• -max-error-count:<integer>
• Minor fix to intrinsics.alloca
• struct #no_copy to prevent trivial copying in certain cases
• Experimental: @(deferred_*_by_ptr=<proc>) attributes
• Fix a race condition in -use-separate-modules due to type determination in the backend
• Make !x be an untyped boolean
• When using -debug, the compiler now defaults to -o:none unless explicitly specified

New Packages

• vendor:lua
  • vendor:lua/5.1
  • vendor:lua/5.2
  • vendor:lua/5.3
  • vendor:lua/5.4

Package Improvements

• Numerous bug fixes
• Numerous improvements to documentation
• Improve JSON tokenizer
• Fix append with zero sized types
• Partially buffer all fmt.fprint* related calls using a bufio.Writer
• Add bit_array.unsafe_get/bit_array.unsafe_set
• Minor fix to core:text/edit

dev-2023-04

New Language Features

• Allow case nil within a type switch statement

Compiler Improvements

• Add -o:none optimization mode (useful for -debug builds)
• General improvements to -debug builds
• Add -no-thread-local flag
• Fix minor memory leak in the compiler
• Improve SysV ABI for multiple return values and structs
• Add @(extra_linker_flags=<string>) attribute for foreign import
• Improvements to the documentation generation for handling comments

New Packages

• vendor:raylib version 4.5
• core:text/table
  • Table generation utility which can output to plaintext, markdown, and HTML

Package Improvements

• General improvements to core:net
• Improvements to strconv.parse_f64_prefix
• Simplification and improvement of strings.split_multi_iterator
• Make core:image packages work on js platform by not requiring core:os
• Numerous package documentation

dev-2023-03

New Language Features

• BREAKING CHANGE: Brand New Default context.temp_allocator Implementation
  • New version is a growing arena based approach
    • Old version used an unsafe ring buffer
  • IMPORTANT free_all(context.temp_allocator) must be called to clear the contents of the internal arena (unlike the previous ring buffer)
    • It is recommended that this is done per frame/cycle/etc
• expand_values()
  • Built-in procedure which expands a struct or fixed-length array into multiple values

Foo :: struct {x: f32, y: i32}
f := Foo{1, 2}
a, b := expand_values(f)
assert(a == 1 && b == 2)

• Allow comparisons between empty struct{} and union{}
• Allow for assigning to fields through using in a compound literal

Foo :: struct {
	using x: struct { // named `using` fields
		y: int,
	},
	z: f32
	using _: struct { // anonymous `using` fields
		w: bool,
	},
}

f := Foo{
	y = 123, // equivalent to `x = {y = 123},`
	z = 456,
	w = true,
}

• Verbose error messages by default with optional ANSI colouring too:
  • Previous behaviour is available with -terse-errors
  • Automatic detection of ANSI colours is currently only supported for Windows
  • set ODIN_TERMINAL=ansi to force ANSI colouring
  • Line printing with indication of the error location below
    

Compiler Improvements

• @(fini) to complement its opposite @(init)
• Fix to byval parameters on Darwin SysV ABI which in turn fixes #by_ptr
• Rename to runtime.Type_Info_Parameters for procedures inputs and outputs
• Fix issue that conflicts with constant parapoly procedure literals and @(deferred_*)
• Numerous improvements to error messages

New Packages

Package Improvements

• Introduction of time.tsc_frequency()
• Improvements to core:mem/virtual's Arena
  • On free_all free all memory blocks except for the first one
  • virtual.arena_destroy will free all memory blocks including the first one (assuming Growing or Static)
• Add #optional_allocator_error to make_map
• Numerous improvements to the vendor:directx packages

dev-2023-02

New Language Features

Compiler Improvements

Compile Time Speed Optimizations

• Multithreaded frontend by default
  • Using the new and improved work stealing thread pool system
  • Fix numerous race conditions
  • Replace many instances of MPMC queues with MPSC queues
  • Replace many instances of BlockingMutex with RwMutex
  • Replace many instances of RecursiveMutex with BlockingMutex
• Multithread backend when the experimental -use-separate-modules is used
  • -use-separate-modules turns each package into a separate translation unit (object file) and then links them all together. This allows LLVM be multithreaded at the translation unit stage (LLVM Module).
  • -use-separate-modules will not produce as good code compared to without it because of the multiple translation units.
• Improvements to the hash table related structures (StringMap, StringSet, PtrMap, PtrSet)
• Big improvement to compile times due to the above improvements

General fixes

• Improved type inference for ternary if expressions
• Remove auto_cast from procedure parameters
• Fix bug with built-in matrix transpose caused by misalignment of the value
• Fix valgrind assembly generation
• Allow when statements within foreign blocks at the file scope

New Packages

Package Improvements

• core:mem/virtual Arena_Temp improvements
  • arena_temp_ignore allowing for ignoring of a temporary section if necessary
• Numerous bug fixes

dev-2023-01

New Language Features

Compiler Improvements

• Improvements to multiple return values ABI for Odin calling conventions
  • #2208
• Improved internal thread pool implementation (ready for next month's release)
  • Futex usage too
• Numerous bug and typo fixes

New Packages

• core:text/match

Package Improvements

• Make sync calls contextless where possible
• Add different variants for sync.once_do
• Make os.get_last_error contextless
• Numerous fixes to core:fmt

dev-2022-12

New Language Features

• New map: High performance, cache-friendly, open-addressed Robin Hood hashing hash map data structure with various optimizations for Odin
  • PR #2181
  • Smaller internal data structure than previously (4 pointers down from 7 pointers)
  • SOA based memory layout
  • Up to 4x-6x faster insertion and lookup on average
  • Entries are stored in non-contiguous cell-layout which means no element straddles across a cache line
  • Only one allocation per map rather than two (previously hashes and entries)
    • Only requires alloc_non_zeroed and free internally
  • Robin Hood hashing
  • Smaller header information (runtime.Map_Info) for dynamic calls.
  • Allows for calling delete_key whilst iterating across the map

Compiler Improvements

• Add debug symbols for global constants for integers, booleans, enums, runes, and pointers
  • Variables are namedspaced with pkg::name, or name if built-in (or the initial package for convenience)
• Improvements to debug information generation
• -default-to-nil-allocator also enabled -no-dynamic-literals
• Improvements to intrinsics.ptr_sub code generation
• Numerous bug fixes

New Packages

• vendor:cgltf

Package Improvements

• Add Allocator_Mode.Alloc_Non_Zeroed
• DirectX packages to use bit_set for flags where possible instead of just an enum
• Implement numerous core:math procedures in native Odin
• Add math.pow10
• Add strings.write_(f16|f32|f64)
• Add user_data: rawptr to filepath.Walk_Proc

dev-2022-11

New Language Features

-

Compiler Improvements

• Make raw_data an intrinsic rather than a @(builtin) runtime procedure
• Allow transmute to be constant for integers of the same internal endianness
• Throw type checker error when scalar cast to non-square matrix
• Fix #defined(I)
• Build script: Detect which and complain if not found
• Add early LLVM > 14 detection, as LLVM 15 and above are not (yet) supported
• Remove previously deprecated -opt flag
• Improve SysV ABI LLVM IR generation for development purposes
• Use direct parameter value in lb_find_ident when possible
• Optimize #caller_location and #location to use read only data section where possible
• Ad-hoc pass source code location directly by pointer without stack copy
• Clarify odin help for -define
• Add -minimum-os-version for Darwin targets, e.g. -minimum-os-version:12.0.0
• Add -target-features flag to force extra LLVM options
• Add safety check for #2161

New Packages

-

Package Improvements

• Update Darwin release map for core:sys/info
• Unify Static_Arena and Growing_Arena into Arena
• Many improvements to core:mem/virtual in general
• Add and correct various Windows, Darwin, glfw, objC and other bindings
• Allow for N = -1 in wstring_to_utf8
• Add core:math/rand.choice
• Heavily improve time handling on Windows for time.now() and os.File_Info

dev-2022-10

New Language Features

• cap(Enum), equivalent to max(Enum)-min(Enum)+1
• ODIN_BUILD_PROJECT_NAME constant
• //+build-project-name build directive
• intrinsics.type_convert_variants_to_pointers
• Add helgrind and valgrind support

Compiler Improvements

• Greatly improve error messages
• Preparations for Compiler Explorer support
• Use uint instead of int to improve bounds checking code generation
• Replace #optional_second with #optional_allocator_error
• Remove extra pointer indirection
• Make intrinsics.count_{ones,zeros,trailing_zeros,leading_zeros} work at compile time
• Improve map
• Improve parapoly support for ^T to [^]$V and vice versa
• Various bugfixes
• Simplify win32 resource file linking
• Add Windows 32-bit build system error
• Add help command, so you can now use odin help build in addition to odin build -help
• Improve macOS version detection for odin report

New Packages

• Add vendor:zlib
• Begin work on core:debug/pe to parse PE files
• Add core:sys/info to query CPU, GPU, RAM, etc.

Package Improvements

• Add system:legacy_stdio_definitions.lib to core:c
• Allow reading/writing files larger than max(i32) on Darwin
• Allow skipping unused fields in core:encoding/json
• Add parsing of +/-Inf and NaN to core:strconv
• Add additional win32 imports and constants
• Fix typo in map_insert
• Fix libc.aligned_alloc
• Add slice.enumerated_array
• Add serial comms support to core:sys/windows
• Add complex support to core:libc
• Correct json unmarshal of maps
• Fix Darwin libs for vendor:stb/image
• Added support for ID3D11InfoQueue to vendor:directx
• Improve core:mem/virtual handling of out of memory on Windows
• Simplify core:io by removing different unnecessary types and calls
• Add the builtin procedures abs, clamp, min, max to core:math as aliases

dev-2022-09

New Language Features

• #soa pointer type to ad with refactory to #soa data types
  • e.g. #soa ^#soa[]T

New Compiler Features

• Make unreachable() a built-in compiler-level procedure
• Allow for foo() or_else unreachable() or other diverging procedures

Compiler Improvements

• #load can now optionally import the loaded file data as a different type than []u8
  • #load(path)
  • #load(path, []T) (where T is a type that can be trivially loaded from memory (i.e. no pointers))
  • #load(path, string) (shorthand for string(#load(path)))
• Deprecate #load_or(path, default) in favour of #load(path) or_else default
• Allow chaining of #load(path1) or_else #load(path2)
• Pass size information to allocator to delete, when possible, to improve tracking information
• Improved detection of rc.exe
• Improvements to debug symbols for range intervals
• Fix Objective-C related x->y() calls in Odin
• Prepare for future LLVM versions
• Various bugfixes

New Packages

• vendor:commonmark
  • Markdown Variant: https://commonmark.org/

Package Improvements

• core:image/tga can now load as well
• Add math.divmod and math.floor_divmod
• Pretty marshal output for core:encoding/json
• Add ID3D11Debug to vendor:directx/d3d11 package
• Add wgl, raw input, and additional Windows imports
• Add more core:container/queue helpers and peek_front and peek_back
• Add reflect.get_union_variant
• Add slice.sort_with_indices family of procedures
• Improvements to sync.Futex support on windows
• Add core:sys/valgrind package for valgrind, memcheck, and callgrind
• Various bugfixes