Version 0.4.4 released
Oh boy, it’s another Urn update! I know, I can hardly supress my excitment. There’s been almost 50 commits since the last release, and a whole host of features inside those commits. So let’s get started.
Goodbye setf!, hello lenses!
A while ago we introduced the collections library and the joy that is lenses. I won’t re-iterate what is
said there, but in essence it provides a powerful and composable way to query and update objects (as well as making
immutable copies of them). We’ve merged this feature into the main standard library, replacing the rather hacky setf!.
String interpolation
If you need to concatinate a load of strings together, there aren’t many nice ways. Sure, format strings help a bit but
there is nothing quite as great as string interpolation! Prefixing a string with the dollar ($) sign (or calling the
$ macro) allows you to embed variables directly in code:
> (let [(foo "some string")
. (bar '(1 2 3))]
. $"Interpolating ${foo} and ~{bar}")
"Interpolating some string (1 2 3)"
Currently Urn’s implementation is very basic, just allowing variables (it’s implemented as a macro after all), but we’ve plans to extend it.
More code-generation improvements
Every release I witter on about the various code generation improvements we’ve made, and this time is no exception. I’ve been running the generated code through luacheck to try to find some places where we’re generating pretty poor Lua code. We’ve made a lot of progress in this area, cutting the number of warnings from 469 to 104 (which equates to a warning on 1.2% of lines).
This isn’t just a meaningless statistic though - the end result means more compact and “readable” code. Thanks to various enhancements, we’ve cut 300 lines from the previous release.