_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

ZPE 1.10.8 is even faster than before! With new performance improvements and new features including TYPO v2.1 and typing within function declarations, ZPE 1.10.8 is set to be a big release. Data types have been added now to the stdLib to the functions that support it, but it became very apparent that multiple return types should be a bigger update than 1.10.7 was! 

How can we keep the performance high and yet add typing? Admittedly, every time a new feature is added, or a new check is required, performance takes a little dip. That is definitely true with anything. But performance can be made up elsewhere, and one of the areas where I have identified a performance gain is with the LAME evaluator and so I will continue to look into improving the LAME evaluator to make up for this.

Even without these improvements, or compiler optimisations, ZPE's standard library compiles and executes exceptionally fast, taking just 80ms to compile and run - that's very fast! 

Future plans for 1.10.8 also include auto prepending compiled files to make execution even faster. I will publish the next version of ZPE, which although will not be the finished version of ZPE 1.10.8, will allow you to test it out and I'll publish that today.

The ZPE/YASS compiler has featured support for typing of parameters for a long time, except it doesn't do anything. One could write something like the example below:

function test(number $s) {
  print($s)
}

test("Hello world")

And yet nothing will happen when it is given a string value instead of a number value. This is because, although it compiles correctly and is a well-formed ZPE expression, ZPE's runtime doesn't actually know what to do with it. 

Looking back, the way in which ZPE's function calls are made by placing parameters in an ordered set has barely changed and has stayed about the same since ZPE 1.3 when functions were properly introduced. 

ZPE also doesn't support return types. But it will very soon and the syntax has been decided (and included) already:

function test(number $s) : number {
  return $s + 5
}

Since the original method of generating parameters has been in ZPE and barely changed since 2015, it will be a rather big job to update this but it'll be worth it in the continuing move to making ZPE and YASS strongly typed. However, from ZPE 1.10.8 onwards, it will be possible to write programs that use strongly typed parameters and provide return types, they just will not do anything.

The new version of ZPE is out now in beta stages, and it's pretty awesome, to say the least.

ZPE 1.10.7, aka Hasty Hyena, is quite symbolic since it now features symlink features. 

The three new functions, which currently remain undocumented, are able to add symbolic links, check if a file is a link, and the best one, replace a part of a link. 

The last function here is the most interesting and useful. I came up with the idea since I often need to update links on my Linux-based systems and must delete the whole link and then relink it. This function takes in the original link, figures out the exact path it points to, converts the path to a string and replaces the search term with the new replacement, moves the old link and then writes the new link to the old link path. This is something that will save me time on my server for sure.

It also brings the new run_in function, another extremely useful function that runs a function (or a lambda function) in a certain number of milliseconds, either continuously or just once. 

Finally, create_cron_job is another new function coming to ZPE later this month, as well as a new command line that's also coming along. This will allow you to schedule cron jobs that ZPE will handle. The command line is designed to be run through the -x mode and will continue running in the background. ZPE aims to simplify the whole process of creating cron jobs, and will also store the actual commands in JSON files that make it easier to modify them later.

It was never my intention to release a new version of ZPE every year, and given that some releases are considerably bigger than others this would be difficult to sustain. However, 2022 has actually led to just that - ZPE has released once a month, and the version numbers, as a result, tie-up with the release dates.

For the foreseeable future, ZPE will continue to follow this and one new minor version will be released monthly, no matter what. I will devise a scheme for deciding when a new version will be released to the public. This is actually very similar to the way that Ubuntu's naming scheme goes. 

Further to this, if changes are made to the YASS syntax from this moment on, YASS will move to a new version based on the month it was updated. At present, YASS sits at version 22 since the last changes were made in 2022, but if changes were made in, say October 2022, YASS would become version 22.10.