0.0.0-alpha.8

• Added sliding-window support and improved normalization handling for model execution.
• Introduced Metal-accelerated ops for RMSNorm, Softmax, and RoPE, with SDPA logic refactoring.
• Expanded RopeScaling support (including additional YaRN parameters) and updated parsing.
• Added abort capabilities in engine/scheduler flows for running sequence control.
• Improved model lifecycle management with model removal and registry handling improvements.

New Features

• Sliding-window attention and related cache/model-path improvements.
• Abort functionality in engine and scheduler paths.
• Completion token tracking in engine events.
• Optional bias support in attention-related linear projection.
• Support for known unsupported architectures in defaults/parsing, with better surfacing.
• Better message truncation behavior in interactive mode.
• Additional file-type support in model size estimation.

Performance and Efficiency

• Metal kernel usage for key transformer primitives (RMSNorm, Softmax, RoPE).
• Attention and paged KV cache optimizations for tensor handling and memory efficiency.
• Ensured tensor contiguity before critical ops in attention/cache paths.
• Simplified attention path by removing unnecessary padding logic.
• Feed-forward path optimized via GateUpProjection enum restructuring.

Reliability and Correctness

• Improved error handling across model loading, chat template application, engine loop, and registry save flow.
• Added abort mechanism for consecutive engine errors.
• Enforced max_tokens limit in chat completions.
• Corrected architecture display for Qwen2 and Qwen3 in GGUF discovery.
• Improved transformer layer validation logic.

Refactors and Maintainability

• Core module maintainability refactors across attention/block/mask/prefix-cache/sampling/routes.
• Simplified token decoding logic in interactive and request enqueue flows.

Dependencies

• Removed unused rayon dependency.
• Updated Candle package source/version in Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock.