The Jim Interpreter

Thursday, 25 July 2013

Jim Tcl version 0.74

ANNOUNCE: Jim Tcl version 0.74

Jim Tcl 0.74 has been released and is available from:

http://repo.or.cz/w/jimtcl.git or https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl

Find out all about Jim Tcl at http://jim.tcl.tk/

CHANGES SINCE VERSION 0.73

This release is mostly a bug fix release with some performance enhancements and a few small additional features. A summary is below. See git for the full changelog.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release.

Bugs fixed in version 0.74

• Space allocated for exec envenvironment may be one byte short
• Fix glob with patterns containing spaces, [ and ]
• Sense of fconfigure -blocking is reversed
• subst -noc should substitute vars inside brackets
• Fix a reference counting bug
• Fix invalid memory reference during finalisers
• Fix an invalid memory reference in info references
• Fix a buffer overflow in info references
• Ensure that the full ref is passed to finalizer
• Fix conversion of numbers >= 2^31
• Fix binary scan for too-few bytes.
• Fix bug that was causing the system environ variable to be freed
• Fix a linenoise bug when moving off the left
• Fix linenoise serial console window size for vt102
• Fix a bug in the sqlite3 module (array index out of bounds)
• Fix string replace replacing a single char

Features added in version 0.74

• Add support for aio isatty
• Remove octal literals with a leading 0 (http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/114.html)
• Add support for glob -directory
• Allow abbreviations to glob options
• Ensure that signals can break vwait
• Allow aio copyto and aio read to copy >2GB
• aio seek and aio tell should allow for 64 bit offsets
• Add support for string equal -length and string compare -length

Performance Improvements

Thanks in large part to Lauri Kasanen, performance of Jim Tcl has improved by up to 20% in some areas compared to version 0.73.

    Executable Size     +1%
          PI digits     -4%
    [for] busy loop       .
       [local] loop       .
  [while] busy loop     -1%
                ary    -10%
         ary [dict]    -20%
       ary [static]     -1%
       dynamic code     -3%
dynamic code (list)       .
             expand     -1%
      fibonacci(25)     +1%
           heapsort     -4%
             mandel     -9%
         mini loops       .
       nested loops       .
             repeat       .
             rotate       .
              sieve    -20%
       sieve [dict]    -20%
              upvar    -16%
   wiki.tcl.tk/8566       .

Steve Bennett (steveb@workware.net.au)