🎉 Blaise v0.15.0 is out — hello, Apple Silicon!

[graemeg]

Hi everyone,

I'm delighted to announce Blaise v0.15.0. This one is a milestone: Blaise now runs natively on macOS arm64, and Apple Silicon has become the project's primary development host. The compiler builds itself on a Mac with every fixpoint byte-identical, and the Linux and FreeBSD release binaries are now cross-compiled from there.

Here's what the last 579 commits brought.

🍎 macOS arm64, all the way

• A shipped target. There's a macOS arm64 tarball alongside Linux and FreeBSD, self-contained like the others: unpack, then ./blaise --source hello.pas --output hello.
• arm64 parity. Closures and captures, method pointers, interfaces, jumbo sets, threadvars, static arrays by value, record methods and generic records all work on arm64, as on x86-64, and the full test suite passes on both.
• C libraries just work. The internal Mach-O linker now binds libraries beyond libSystem, so external 'z' or external 'ssl' links and runs with no external toolchain. It also checks every libSystem import against the SDK's real export list: a misspelt function name is a clear link error, not a crash at launch.
• Async on the Mac. Fibers run on arm64, and the async runtime uses kqueue on macOS. HTTPS, TLS and WebSocket programs all run.

🧹 Goodbye, QBE

Blaise started on QBE, which got it running while the native backend was built. As planned, QBE is now gone: the native backend, with its own assembler and linker, is the whole toolchain. The Linux release binary is now freestanding and statically linked, with no glibc dependency.

✨ Language

Width-stating type names. You can now say exactly how wide a number is:

var
  Count: Int;      { pointer-sized: counts and indices }
  Pixel: UInt8;
  Ratio: Float;    { always Float64 }

Int8 is new too. Porting FPC or Delphi code? uses ClassicPascalTypes keeps the names you know, and BlaiseGuard's new BL-2006 rule suggests the replacement for each.

Properties in records:

type
  TTemp = record
    FCelsius: Float;
    property Celsius: Float read FCelsius write FCelsius;
  end;

Field widths in WriteLn, plus initialised threadvars and globals:

threadvar Depth: Int = 1;
var Names: array of string = nil;
...
WriteLn('[', 42:6, '] [', 3.14159:8:3, ']');   { [    42] [   3.142] }

The nearest routine wins. A program's routine can share a name with one from a used unit, and the qualified name still reaches the unit's version:

uses Greet;
procedure Hello; begin WriteLn('Hello from the program') end;
begin
  Hello();         { the program's }
  Greet.Hello()    { the unit's }
end.

Interfaces, checked twice over. IGreeter(P) is checked when it compiles; O as IGreeter queries at run time and raises a catchable EInvalidCast when it fails.

And more: method pointers convert to reference to wherever one is expected; for-in works over record and interface enumerators; inline procedural types work anywhere; nested type sections; Move and FillByte; and Round now rounds half to even, like Delphi and FPC.

When you reach for something Blaise deliberately leaves out (with, goto, TInterfacedObject), the compiler now says so and shows you the Blaise way, instead of reporting a confusing parse error.

🛡️ Hardening

• Running the whole suite on a second CPU turned up and fixed a long list of codegen and ARC corner cases on both backends.
• A for loop ending at its counter type's limit now terminates on every integer type.
• Float comparisons with a NaN follow IEEE 754.
• Constructors return an owned reference, and dynamic arrays own their managed elements.

🔧 Tools

• BlaiseGuard gains BL-2006, and its config files now build on the defaults. The Blaise codebase itself is clean of unused locals.
• bindgen emits the new type names.
• kanban runs in the macOS terminal.

📊 By the numbers

• The self-hosting fixpoint holds on 1,054,171 lines of arm64 assembly.
• 5,161 compiler tests and 389 stdlib tests pass on macOS arm64 and Linux x86-64.
• The cross-built Linux compiler rebuilds itself byte-for-byte on Linux.

📦 Get it

The macOS arm64, Linux x86-64 and FreeBSD x86-64 tarballs are on the GitHub Releases page. Each includes everything needed to compile hello.pas straight away.

On macOS the binary is ad-hoc signed, not notarised. If the browser download is blocked, run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine . once in the extracted folder.

The full list of changes is in the changelog. Thank you to everyone who tried the pre-release builds, reported bugs and sent fixes. It makes a real difference.

A special thank you, too, to my Patreon sponsors. Your support gives me the time to keep Blaise moving forward, and I'm truly grateful for it.

Onwards to v0.16! 🙌

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