Latest development update

[Christopher Bertels]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to give you a small update on what I've been working on for Fancy lately.

It's coming close to a new official release. The next version would be 0.3.0 but I'll probably skip right over to 0.4.0 since it's been a long time since the last release :)

Some of the stuff I've been working on are:

- Solid integration with Rubinius - Call any Ruby library and C-extension that runs on Rubinius

- Support for Threads and Fibers

- Support for Futures - An easy to use alternative for doing async / concurrent operations:

    object @ foo

    Sends the message 'foo' to object asynchronously and immediately returns a Future. To get the value of that async message send do:

    f = object @ foo

    f value # <- get the value. This blocks the current Thread if f hasn't completed computation yet.

- Pygments lexer for Fancy. It will be integrated in the next official release of Pygments (http://pygments.org/) and hopefully we'll have

  syntax highlighting for Fancy on GitHub then (GitHub uses Pygments for their syntax highlighting)

- More work on standard library - New classes, methods etc.

- More work on built-in package manager (still some minor stuff missing - coming soon)

- Started work on new and more flexible pattern matching system. This is still a work in progress, but you can view the changes in the

  'patterns' branch here: https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/commits/patterns

  It basically will allow users to define custom pattern classes and destructuring semantics while still preserving encapsulation, e.g.

  pattern matching in an object-oriented way. Still have to add syntax support for pattern literals to make using them easy.

- And probably lots more I forgot now

Coming up next (probably after the upcoming release):

- Actors

- First-class async support (probably using Fibers)

- More work on standard library

If you have any questions, feedback or ideas let me know.

Cheers,

Christopher.