Crystal 1.8.0 is released!

We are delivering a new release with several bugfixes and improvements. Below we list the most important or interesting changes, without mentioning several bugfixes and smaller enhancements. For more details, visit the changelog. Breaking changes are marked with ⚠️.

Pre-built packages are available on GitHub Releases and our official distribution channels. See crystal-lang.org/install for installation instructions.

Stats

This release includes 181 changes since 1.7.3 by 23 contributors. We thank all the contributors for all the effort put into improving the language! ❤️

Below we list the most remarkable changes in the language, compiler and stdlib.

Regex: PCRE2

⚠️ A big and necessary change in this release is that PCRE2 becomes the default engine for Regex (#12978). Support for PCRE2 was added in 1.7 and stabilized in 1.7.3. We feel it’s safe to use it by default. A fallback to PCRE is still possible, either automatically if PCRE2 is unavailable at compile time, or via the compiler flag -Duse_pcre.

Package maintainers

From 1.8 onwards the Crystal compiler should be built with PCRE2 to ensure consistency.

⚠️ As a measure to ease migration to PCRE2, Regex::Options gained more named members which work in both engine versions. To accommodate the additional values, the enum base type changes from Int32 to UInt64 (#13223). ⚠️ Additionally, a new enum Regex::MatchOptions was added to hold options specific to match operations and Regex::Options is now aliased as Regex::CompileOptions (#13248). The Regex::Options overloads for match methods are deprecated.

Regex: Invalid UTF

⚠️ Unrelated to the upgrade this release includes a bugfix that affects both engine versions. Crystal’s String class is intended to be valid UTF-8 but this is not enforced and it’s perfectly accepted to contain invalid UTF-8. When passing a string to PCRE or PCRE2 it’s necessary to ensure its contents are valid. This was not done before and subsequently the library could crash. Now Regex.new and all match methods validate the strings and raise an exception if they contain invalid UTF-8.

If a string is known to be valid UTF-8, the options Regex::CompileOptions::NO_CHECK_UTF and Regex::MatchOptions::NO_CHECK_UTF skip validation for increased performance.

The option Regex::CompileOptions::MATCH_INVALID_UTF can be used to explicitly match against subject strings with invalid UTF-8. This feature is available in PCRE2 from version 10.34 onward, and a serious bug was fixed in 10.36. So it’s not recommended to use an earlier version.

Language

The only explicit language change is that namespaced Paths are allowed as type names for lib (#12903).

lib Foo::LibBar
end

As a consequence of upgrading the regex library, compilers starting with 1.8 perform syntax checks of regex literals with PCRE2. Hence the syntax of regex literals changes from PCRE-compatible to PCRE2-compatible (which is pretty much the same for most use cases). Read more in the PCRE2 announcement post.

LLVM Updates

This release adds support for LLVM 15 (#13173 which includes a migration to LLVM’s opaque pointers. This has shown to offer a substantial improvement to compilation speed.

Package maintainers

We recommend building Crystal with LLVM 15 for improved compile performance.

⚠️ On a related note, this release drops support for older LLVM versions. Crystal now requires LLVM 8 or higher (#12906).

LLVM 16 support is in the works (#13181).

Platform support

This version comes with support for Android, and significant advances in Windows, all listed below. The x86_64-linux-musl target moved up into Tier 1.

Additionally, we revamped the list of supported platforms to include more specific information about the current level of support.

AArch64 Android

It is now possible to target Android with the Bionic C runtime (aarch64-linux-android). The details of how to get this working are in the relevant PR (#13065).

Windows

We’re making progress on reaching full stdlib feature coverage for Windows.

This release includes a couple of improvements relating to symbolic links (#13141, #13195) ⚠️ An important change to align behaviour with POSIX platforms is that File.delete (instead of Dir.delete) removes any symlink, even when it points to a directory (#13224).

OpenSSL now uses Windows’ system root certificate store (#13187).

⚠️ This release also adds a full stub for Windows signals (#13131). More on that in the next section.

While Windows 7 has reached EOL, we understand that support is still necessary for some use cases. Therefore, we accepted a patch to lower the supported Windows version (#11505).

Signal

In Unix systems, inter-process communication such as terminating processes and responding to interrupts is based on signals and subsequently the Signal API in Crystal was used for this. To support operating systems that use different mechanisms for that (such as Windows), it’s necessary to have portable APIs which abstract the intention from the implementation.

Process.on_interrupt handles interrupts: SIGINT (Unix) and Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break (Windows) (#13034).
Process#terminate gained a graceful parameter. On Unix it selects between SIGTERM and SIGKILL while it has no effect on Windows and the behaviour is similar to taskkill /f regardless (#13070).
Process::Status#exit_reason and Process::ExitReason provide information about a program’s exit status in a portable way (#13052).

Stdlib

We fixed some function definitions for LibC that used the wrong types (e.g. Int instead of SizeT) in #13242 and #13249. This affects a bug with sending huge network packets on *-linux-gnu targets.

HTTP

HTTP::StaticFileHandler now supports Range requests (#12886).

Spec

spec results are formatted with pretty_inspect (#11635) and the spec runner supports a --color option (#12932).

Enum

⚠️ Enum#includes? now requires all bits to be set (#13229).

⚠️ Enum.[] is a new convenience constructor, especially useful for flag enums. It replaces Enum.flags which is now deprecated (#12900). Enum#inspect uses the concise syntax of Enum.[] (#13004).

Range

⚠️ Range#size, #each, #sample no longer error at compile time when a generic argument is Nil. For instance, (..4).each { } now raises at runtime instead of failing to compile (#13278).

Indexable

⚠️ This is just a documentation update, but it makes sense to mention it here. Implementations of Indexable are expected to be stable, i.e. do not change behaviour unless explicitly mutated (#13061).

Shards 0.17.3

This Crystal release comes with a new release of shards: version 0.17.3. It brings two small improvements to show contextful error messages if a git command failed.

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