v1.9.0

v1.9.0

New Features

• New tcl f5 CLI suite for working with BIG-IP configurations. The
  initial drop ships 17 top-level verbs plus 5 irule sub-verbs covering the
  full operator lifecycle:
  • Acquire: fetch (pull SCF/UCS from a live BIG-IP via REST or SSH),
    extract / ucs2scf (unpack a local UCS archive into SCF).
  • Analyse: stats, graph (DOT / JSON / Mermaid dependency graphs),
    explain, diff (semantic, ignores ordering and iRule whitespace),
    validate / lint (with a built-in rule registry, irule lint,
    SARIF output), cleanup (find and remove unreferenced objects), and
    grep (find every object related to a name, regex, or CIDR).
  • Transform: rename, redact (stable, reversible IP redaction with
    a sidecar map and CIDR-relationship preservation), unredact,
    pcap-remap (apply a redaction map to a PCAP / PCAPNG capture, including
    F5 trailer rewrites), tmsh / scf2tmsh, split, merge, convert.
  • Round-trip: pull, push (single-object iControl REST round-trip),
    plus irule trace and irule extract for iRule-focused inspection.
• New f5 explain-flow and f5 explain-pcap verbs trace a request
  or PCAP flow through the BIG-IP configuration — virtuals, profile chains,
  iRule decisions, LTM policy decisions, pools, and members — and narrate
  the path. Ships alongside an installable Claude skill at
  ai/claude/skills/explain-flow/ that shares its narration prompt with
  the CLI.
• New f5 enrich-pcapng and f5 enrich-wireshark verbs annotate
  packet captures with BIG-IP object metadata.
• New LTM policy parser and evaluator — parses ltm policy stanzas
  into a structured model and evaluates rules against captured request
  state, with first-match / all-match / best-match strategies and a
  reasonable operand surface (HTTP host/URI/method/header, SNI, TCP
  address) and action surface (forward, redirect, URI replace, header
  insert/remove, TCP reset).
• New tcl completion verb emits bash / zsh / fish completion scripts
  for the tcl CLI, with a --hint flag for the install snippet.
• New string insert command and relative-qualified ensemble dispatch
  (tcl::string::reverse etc. now work without a leading ::).
• Tier-5 parity for string is and format brings the WASM runtime up
  to Tcl 9.0 semantics: full class table for string is (including
  dict, list, wordchar, entier, true, false, prefix matching,
  -strict, -failindex); full format specifier surface (#, ,
  b, u, p, h, hh, %c Unicode, positional %n$, alt-form hex,
  Tcl-style 0 / - flag interaction, missing-arg / mid-spec / mix
  errors).

Improvements

• Closed all 77 bytecode-identity xfails: proc lifting, switch lowering,
  and the rest of the codegen pipeline now match tclsh 9.0 byte-for-byte
  across the reference snippet suite.
• WASM codegen now supports dynamic variable names — set ::$n v,
  incr ::$n, lappend $local x and friends route through the runtime
  variable resolver instead of being collapsed to a literal slot.
• Five Tier-2 WASM trap stems (parse, error, cmdAH, cmdIL, list)
  now run end to end, adding 4316 newly-passing tcltest cases against the
  Tcl 9 baseline (cmdAH alone contributes 3885).
• test-slow now provisions missing host dependencies (tclsh 8.6 /
  9.0, Node / npm, kotlinc) idempotently across Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL
  family, and macOS, captures missing Tcl 9.0 bytecode reference files,
  and fetches dependencies in parallel.
• The MCP server (ai/mcp/tcl_mcp_server.py) exposes the new f5 verbs
  to AI-assisted workflows.

Bug Fixes

• return -code error / compiled INST_RETURN_IMM — corrected the stack
  contract so the result value is read from OBJ_UNDER_TOS and the options
  dict from OBJ_AT_TOS, matching tclsh. Fixes empty-message errors
  from compiled error calls.
• {*} expansion inside command substitutions no longer drops arguments.
• for and mathop honour next-clause break / continue control codes,
  and shift-count validation matches the INT_MAX cap that Tcl 9 enforces
  in INST_LSHIFT / INST_RSHIFT.
• Array-reference codegen — bare $arr(idx) with a literal index now
  normalises to ${arr(idx)} so it compiles to an array load, while
  substituted-index forms ($a(\$cmd)) still round-trip correctly.
• Indirect set $expr value now evaluates the variable name at runtime
  instead of being treated as a literal.
• namespace origin and namespace forget now match Tcl 9 semantics:
  origin walks the imported-command redirect chain to its source FQN,
  and forget properly tombstones the importing namespace's command
  table so a follow-up rename no longer fails with "command already
  exists".
• Variable-trace callbacks now receive the full op word (read / write
  / unset / array) instead of the internal single-character code, and
  callbacks that capture $op into long-lived variables no longer dangle
  into freed parser buffers.
• info locals returns the active proc frame's local names (it
  previously fell through to the empty-string fallback).

Breaking Changes

• The irule CLI binary alias is removed. iRules-specific verbs
  (event-order, event-info) move to f5 irule … sub-verbs and default
  to the f5-irules dialect; generally useful verbs (command-info,
  convert, help, diff, the core analysis verbs) stay on tcl and
  continue to accept --dialect f5-irules for iRules input.