mruby 2.1.2

We are announcing the stable release of mruby 2.1 series - mruby 2.1.2.

New Features

Core Language Features

  • Support for Argument Forwarding, which allows you to forward arguments in the form def foo(...).

mruby VM and bytecode

  • Add OP_LOADI16 instruction that loads a 16-bit integer into a register.
  • Remove endian information/flags from compiled binary format.
  • The version of the mruby binary has changed from 0006 to 0007.

for mruby Developer

  • Add new C APIs.
    • mrb_float_to_cstr() - Convert Float to C String.
    • mrb_singleton_class_ptr() - Get pointer of Singleton class. #4973
    • mrb_utf8len() - Get size of UTF-8 string. #4712
    • mrb_utf8_strlen() - Get length of UTF-8 string. #4712
    • mrb_get_arg1() - Retrieve the first and only argument from mrb_state.

Update Features

Core Libraries

  • Add to the libraries included by default in the mruby VM.
    • mruby-eval
    • mruby-complex
    • mruby-rational
  • Support MRB_DISABLE_STDIO for mruby-pack and mruby-sprintf. #4954
  • Support IO#pread and IO#pwrite on macOS.
  • Improve Kernel.#eval to call method with the same name as a variable name without any arguments.
  • IO#readchar supports UTF-8 characters.

Tools

  • Remove -e / -E options from mrbc.

for mruby Developer

  • Support width specifier with mrb_float_to_str().
  • Support integer and float combination in mrb_equal().

Improve mruby build

  • A mruby can be built without GNU Bison. (a3ec6ede)
  • Supports GitHub Actions. #4903
    Execute CI of the following platforms updating the repository.
    • Ubuntu 16.04
    • Ubuntu 18.04 (gcc)
    • Ubuntu 18.04 (clang)
    • macOS
    • Windows (MinGW)
    • Windows (Cygwin)
    • Windows (MSVC)

Breaking Changes

  • IO#readchar returns a UTF-8 character fragment instead of EOFError if EOF is reached in the middle of UTF-8 characters. (86271572)
    This behavior is different from CRuby, but it is a mruby specification that supports either ASCII or UTF-8 exclusively.
  • Remove mrb_run() from C APIs.

Major bug fixes

  • Segmentation fault at mrb_io_s_select. #4966
  • Segmentation fault at mrb_vm_exec. #4973
  • Some Hash methods are inconsistent with values when hash has duplicate key. 181f7b97
  • Get local variable names from orphan block. #5014
  • Memory leaks in some places when out of memory. f1523d24
  • Heap buffer overflow in mruby interpreter. #5042
  • Type tag not used when calculating hash code. #5049

We have done 185 commits to 99 files with 14,883 additions and 1,653 deletions since mruby 2.1.1. For more detail of the updates, see Commit Log.

Thanks all the contributors who have worked on bug fix and improvements in the release of mruby 2.1.2.