v0.24.0

Acton now supports package dependencies and has a package manager to work with
these, fetching and building them. There are new docs at https://acton.guide
It's now possible to write Acton low level code in Zig, in addition to C.

Added

• New docs: https://acton.guide
  • Starting point was the Acton-by-Example and it's been improved from there
    with new content and updates of existing pages
  • New top level structure making it easier to navigate
  • Includes a guide on how to integrate a C library
• Package management!
  • Acton now supports adding dependencies on other packages, either in a local
    path or to be downloaded from the Internet.
  • New commands, acton pkg add etc to manage dependencies, see
    https://acton.guide for more
  • This largely relies on the Zig package manager and the Zig build system
  • It is also possible to add a Zig package dependency in an Acton project in
    order to enable the integration with Zig / C / C++ libraries
• Lots of improvements around the build system
  • Upgrade to Zig v0.13
  • Avoid anonymousDependency which is deprecated in newer Zig versions
  • Materialize build.zig on disk, to allow customization, like adding
    dependencies
  • Send deps as zig CLI arguments instead of hacking builder imports
  • Remove old extra headers, now included in Zig 0.13
• Add any() and all() - does what it sounds like
  • These were previously removed due to a bug but are now brought back
• json.encode() now has a pretty option to enable pretty printing
• file.ReadFile() & file.WriteFile() now support taking an advisory lock on
  Linux and MacOS
• acton now takes a project lock before compiling to avoid races
• Revamped zig build caching, separating the local and global cache
  • Only the local one is automatically periodically cleaned
• Add support for writing Acton modules in Zig
  • It is now possible to write functions in Zig, thus making the entire Zig
    ecosystem potentially reachable with ease
• Add new base64 module to stdlib
  • It is built on the Zig stdlib base64 functions
• Allow naming overlap in hierarchical modules
  • It is now possible to have a module foo (src/foo.act) and a foo.bar
    (src/foo/bar.act), which would previously conflict and yield a compilation
    error.
• Fixed scope extension to handle accessing variables in else defined in try
• Fixed CPS'ed init so we can correctly instantiate actors in class init
• Fixed passing function with mut effect to actor
  • The actor seal leak detection would incorrectly trigger. We need a better
    detector, until then the check is removed.
• Fix returning fixed size integer
  • The recent unboxing code misbehaved in some situations when trying to return
    a fixed size integer from a function
• Fix assert(Not)Equal
  • Now actually works for None values, would previously only compare the values
    if they were not-None
• Fix qualified name checking, so we can properly detect method invocation via
  class name even for imported classes
  • This was an issue when importing a module and trying to call a @staticmethod
    on a class
• Improved source location error messages
• Upgraded to Haskell GHC 9.6.6

Changed

• Add remote_close callback to TCPConnection / TCPListenConnection &
  TLSconnection
• Use OSError instead of RuntimeError for general exceptions in the file
  module functions and classes
• argparse --help now shows help for the most specific cmd
• Remove worked thread CPU affinity to get compile speedup
  • This is primarily as a workaround for slow Zig builds. For acton build we
    run the acton compiler actonc and eventually zig build. Zig gets the
    number of parallel worker threads to run by inspecting its affinity. When
    started by Acton, it inherits the affinity of the worker thread that started
    it.
  • CPU affinity is probably a win for server workloads, so this is a
    regression, but for desktop apps, it likely workb setter not pinning to CPU
    cores

Testing / CI / Build

• Stopped building the vendored libraries we ship, they are now shipped as
  source and compiled on demand
• Force hermetic build on MacOS
  • Avoids pulling in system libraries
• Simplify actondb build
• Add dependabot config for updating GitHub Actions workflows
• Add test on macos-15
• Test other Acton apps in main Acton repo CI