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Poly/ML version 5.8.2
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@dcjm dcjm released this 04 May 11:12
· 607 commits to master since this release
v5.8.2
f84689b

Major Changes

This release includes a major change to the foreign-function interface (FFI). libffi is no longer used except in the interpreted version and instead interface functions are compiled when the buildXX function is called. This results FFI calls being very much faster. Generally the high-level interface in the Foreign structure is unchanged but the low-level structures are different. Foreign.LibFFI has been removed and there are some changes to the Foreign.LowLevel structure. The buildCallback functions have been replaced with buildClosure functions with a slightly different type. Closures are now garbage-collected so if a closure is created and registered with a foreign module a reference must be retained within ML. For backwards compatibility buildClosure functions have been retained which are not garbage-collected.

Minor Changes

  • Support for IPv6 through the addition of INet6Sock and Net6HostDB structures.
  • Addition of PackReal32Big and PackReal32Little structures.
  • Addition of gcState field to PolyML.Statistics. When statistics are exported this allows another process to monitor garbage-collection. This is not useful for local statistics because the local process cannot read the statistics while garbage-collecting.
  • The word arguments in Foreign.Memory.++, -- and the various get and set operations are now treated as signed values.
  • Added Foreign.loadLibraryIndirect. This calls a function before a library is loaded to obtain the name at that point rather than when using the name bound in when the foreign function call is compiled.
  • .sig is now included in the list of extensions for use and PolyML.make. It is the first choice when looking up a signature in PolyML.make, allowing the same name to be used for a signature and a structure or functor.
  • Unix.execute and Unix.executeInEnv are now implemented in the run-time system rather than in ML using Posix.Process.fork and Posix.Process.exec. fork is problematic because there is the chance that the new process may have to garbage-collect before calling exec.
  • Changes to memory allocation to support executable code areas on platforms such as OpenBSD that do not allow pages to mapped with both execute and write permissions.
  • Improvements to speed up the interpreted byte code version.
  • PolyML.export no longer exports interpreted code as executable since it is not actually executed.
  • When exporting to ELF byte data is written to the .rodata section and relocatable data to .data.rel.ro.
  • Internal changes to Posix.Process.sleep, OS.IO.poll and Socket.select to avoid arbitrary precision arithmetic in the run-time system.
  • Internal change to the Windows structure to implement it largely using FFI.
  • Various internal changes to the interface between the run-time system and the basis library.
  • Internal change to profiling to reduce the effect of profiling on the running program.

Bug fixes

  • Fix exponential blow-up of the compilation in the optimiser/simplifier.
  • Fix Bad Address problem with PolyML.objSize in compact 32-bit version.
  • Fix InternalError exception when compiling a signature with an invalid type realisation.
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