v0.5.0

🎉 Milestone 5 Release: Ballerina Native Interpreter

We're excited to announce Milestone 5 — introducing ballerina/http client capabilities and subset 8 language features!

What's included

🌐 HTTP Client Support

Outbound HTTP/HTTPS communication via ballerina/http is now supported:

• Configuration of http:Client with timeouts, redirects, HTTP versions, and security settings
• Support for standard methods: get, post, put, patch, delete, head, and execute
• Response processing via http:Response (headers and JSON, text, or binary payloads)
• Utility for parsing HTTP headers with http:parseHeader

Example:

import ballerina/http;
import ballerina/io;

final http:Client apiClient = check new ("https://httpbin.org/", {
    timeout: 10
});

public function main() returns error? {
    http:Response res = check apiClient->get("/get?text=Hello%20Ballerina");
    io:println("GET Response Status: ", res.statusCode);
    io:println("GET Response Payload: ", check res.getTextPayload());

    json data = {"message": "HTTP client support is now live!"};
    res = check apiClient->post("/post", data);
    io:println("POST Response JSON Payload: ", check res.getJsonPayload());
    io:println("Post Response Content-Type Header: ", check res.getHeader("Content-Type"));
}

🚀 Language Features

Types & Type System

• Add support for module type definitions and enums
• Add support for optional record fields and access
• Add support for mapping constructors
• Add support for member access expressions
• Extend support for type casting
• Support dependently-typed functions with inferred defaults

Functions

• Add support for included record parameters
• Add support for rest parameters in methods
• Add support for isolated functions

Object-Oriented Features

• Support client and isolated class qualifiers
• Add support for remote methods and call actions

Control Flow

• Improve analysis in conditional branches
• Add support for foreach over iterable objects
• Extend query expressions with join, order by, and on conflict

Expressions & Operators

• Add support for XML template namespaces and attributes
• Add support for bitwise complement and nil lifting

⚙️ Runtime

• Detect inherent type violations during mutations
• Enforce read-only propagation for collections
• Fix float semantics and NaN handling

📦 Projects & Packages

• Support resolving external packages and repository implementation

📚 Standard Library

• Expand lang lib support (error, value, string, xml, int)

🛠️ Diagnostics & Quality

• Improve error reporting and migrate conformance tests

📖 Documentation

• Document subset 8 language features

🚀 Download or try it directly in the browser!

🔗 Resources

• Release: v0.5.0
• Supported features:
  • Language: subset8.md
  • Standard Library: subset1.md
• Examples for subset 8: corpus/bal/subset8
• Full Changelog: v0.4.0...v0.5.0