ANNOUNCE: Next Scripting Framework 2.2.0 is available

[gustafn]

Dear Community,

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Next Scripting
Framework (NSF) 2.2.0. The changes are mostly performance and
robustness improvements, providing better error messages etc.
See below for the details.


Diff stats since 2.1.0:
214 files changed, 54192 insertions(+), 44982 deletions(-)


Major changes relative to 2.1.0 are:

New Features

- NSF:

* Robustness improvements:

+ Use exactly the same six white-space delimiter characters in NSF as in
plain Tcl to avoid surprises (internal API: NsfHasTclSpace())

+ Improved parameter parsing: Don't allow bytearrays as name of
non-positional arguments, to avoid that bytearrays get unwanted string
representations (and losing potentially the pure bytearray
property). This could lead to problems with newer Tcl versions
when passing binary data to NSF procs and methods.


* Performance improvements:

+ coloncmd reform: Dispatch performance of [:myMethod ...] is
improved by up to 30% by caching the result of the method lookup
in a Tcl_Obj

+ Lookup of (bytecode-compiled) object variables is now
performed via a sorted lookup cache to avoid repeated linear
searches for compiled locals (especially an improvement for
unsuccessful searches).

+ Reduced number of string comparisons (strcmp()) via first-char
comparison in method-parameter parsing and argument handling.

+ Reduced number of strlen() operations, especially in
method-parameter parsing and argument handling.

+ Reduced memory consumption via better member aligning of
structs, esp. on 64-bit machines.


* New, low-level helper command:

* "::nsf::definitionnamespace": Determines the default namespace
for objects etc. as used internally in NSF

* "::nsf::cmd::info disassemble /methodName/",
"/cls/ info method disassemble /methodName/",
"/obj/ info method disassemble /methodName/": This is the
pendant to ::tcl::unsupported::disassemble adding support for
NSF methods and NSF procs (nsf::proc). See, e.g.,
https://wiki.tcl.tk/21445. The "info" methods are only
available when NSF has been built using --enable-development.

- NX:

* Improvements to incremental property methods: Adding ("value=add")
and deleting elements ("value=delete") now enforce any value
checkers defined on their properties and behave correctly when
conversion is used.

* Improvements to handling of parameter option "substdefault". NX
provides now controls to the developer to select the kind of
substitution at runtime when a default value is used.

+ the "substdefault" options can control via a single argument whether
command/variable/backslash substitution is wanted. Examples:
0x111 substitute all
0x100 only command substitution
0x010 only variable substitution
0x001 only backslash substitution
or any bit combination. Combinations can be used to define the
equivalents of the flag "-nocommands" (0x011), "-novariables"
(0x101), "-nobackslashes" (0x110), and their mixes,
respectively, available to [subst].

+ make behavior of per-object and per-class substdefaults
consistent, early check for complete substitution scripts.

* Improvements to ensemble methods:
+ Fixed bug when ensemble method was dispatched via colon dispatcher
(problem with leading colon)
+ [current nextmethod] + [current isnextcall] return now proper
ensemble methods when necessary

- MongoDB interface upgrade:

* Upgraded driver and utilities to mongodb-c-driver 1.12.0 and libbson 1.12.0.
* Add regular expression queries to conditions in nx::mongo
* Improved portability between platforms/ OS
* Added auto-cleanup of resources (objects) for long-living
execution environments (destroy_on_cleanup).
* More robust serialization of object graphs, by preserving original
classes in serialization/deserialization.
* Fixed default-value handling under certain conditions

- nx::test:

* Provide support for expressing expected results in terms of error
codes, rather than error messages. This is to prepare an upcoming
reform on providing error codes from within NSF more extensively.

- nx::serializer:

* Fix potential problem in NaviServer ns_eval with blueprint updates
on objects, which were not created by the blueprint. Such objects
could lose their classes when these classes are cleaned up on
blueprint evaluation.

- DTrace support (macOS): Adjusted NSF/DTrace integration for
changes on recent macOS (incl. SIP). See dtrace/README for
instructions.

- Documentation:

* NSF now has support for TIP #59 introspection via
::nsf::pkgconfig; see https://core.tcl.tk/tips/doc/trunk/tip/59.md
* Added tutorials on NX properties: tutorial-properties.tcl
* Improved spelling in documentation: next-migration.txt etc.

- Continued testing: NSF is now continuously built and tested under
Linux, macOS, and Windows against different Tcl targets, using
different tool chains (gcc, clang, MinGW, MSVC). For this purpose,
there is now an official GitHub mirror at:

https://github.com/nm-wu/nsf

Build and test reports are available from:

https://travis-ci.com/nm-wu/nsf
https://ci.appveyor.com/project/mrcalvin/nsf-2ylk0

- Maintenance & bug fixes:

* Execution namespace reform: As in earlier releases, NSF methods can
execute in different namespaces such as their object's definition
namespace. Starting with NSF 2.2, the execution namespace is
maintained in a context structure and the namespace is just
changed while the proc is executing. This fixes some
counter-intuitive results using standard Tcl introspection on
these commands.

* Migration to C type 'bool':
replace legacy 0/1 integer bools by proper types when possible.

* Tcl 8.7:

Support for Tcl 8.7a1 and the upcoming, unreleased Tcl 8.7a2
(core.tcl.tk branch "core-8-branch"). NSF compiles and its
regression tests execute successfully.

* Misc (esp. NSF/C):

+ Bug fix: Avoid preemptive frees on %proc substitution for
forwarder methods.
+ Aliases: Avoid Tcl_obj re-creations
+ Guarded against potential Tcl_Obj leaks, esp. when using
"NsfMethodNamePath", as indicated by valgrind.
+ Silenced warnings emitted by GCC 8.1+ on strncat() and strncpy().
+ Addressed 5 code-quality issues as indicated by
Coverity Scan, incl. control-flow issues (risking NULL
dereferencing) and buffer overflows in string operations.
+ Silence warnings under MSVC 1914

* New configure option: "--enable-development=test"
Enable computationally intensive runtime tests, having
noticeable effects on runtime. A version of NSF configured with
"--enable-development" can be used also for production environments.

* Extended regression test suite:
The test suite contains now 6243 tests (for Tcl 8.6.8). This
compares with 5852 tests in NSF 2.1.0 (for Tcl 8.6.6).

- Packaging & distribution:

* Initial support for the new nmake system of TEA (TIP 477) and MSVC
1914 (VS 2017; win/makefile.vc); various fixes to install target.

The detailed changelog is available at
https://next-scripting.org/xowiki/download/file/ChangeLog-2.1.0-2.2.0.log

The Next Scripting Framework 2.2.0 (containing NX 2.2.0 and XOTcl
2.2.0) can be obtained from https://next-scripting.org/. Please report
issues and wishes by opening a ticket at
https://sourceforge.net/p/next-scripting/tickets/.

Best regards
- Gustaf Neumann
- Stefan Sobernig