v0.5.0 - Advanced Features

We are excited to announce the release of Valar v0.5.0. This is a significant update that introduces powerful new capabilities for modern, real-world validation scenarios, along with major performance and extensibility improvements.

New Features in this Release:

• Async Validation Support: The AsyncValidator typeclass has been introduced to support validators that return a Future, allowing for non-blocking, I/O-bound validations.
• Internationalization (i18n): A new valar-translator module provides a mechanism for translating ValidationError messages into different languages.
• Core Extensibility with ValidationObserver: A foundational, zero-overhead pattern has been added for integrating cross-cutting concerns like logging and metrics via the ValidationObserver typeclass.
• JVM Performance & Benchmarking Suite: A JMH benchmark suite has been created to measure and guard against performance regressions on the JVM. This suite will be expanded to include Scala Native in a future release.
• Cross-Platform Support (JVM + Native): The initial work to build and deploy validations consistently across both JVM and Scala Native platforms has been completed.
• Unified Testing with valar-munit: The new valar-munit extension provides a premier, assertion-driven testing experience.

Major Enhancements:

• Improved Macro-Derivation Engine: The existing macro for deriving validators has been completely rewritten for significantly improved performance and faster compilation times. This new engine (Validator.derive and AsyncValidator.derive) automatically populates errors with rich contextual details like field paths and types.
• Expanded Type Support: Native validation for complex data structures like union types has been added.
• Public ErrorAccumulator API: The powerful ErrorAccumulator typeclass is now a public, core feature, allowing developers to implement custom error-handling strategies.