weekly 2024-05-20

MoonBit is a Rust-like programming language (with GC support) and toolchain optimized for WebAssembly.

Language Update

• Breaking Change: Rename Array to FixedArray, @vec.Vec to Array

// Before
fn init {
  let array : @vec.Vec[Int] = [1, 2, 3]
}
// After
fn main {
  let array : Array[Int] = [1, 2, 3]
}

• Add pattern matching support for Map, HashMap.
  • The type must implement the op_get method, where the key is a native type (Int, Char, String, Bool, etc.), and the value is an Option[T].
  • When matching, the key must be a literal.
  • In { "key": pat }, the pattern pat type is Option[T]. None means "key" does not exist, Some(p) means "key" exists, and p will be used to match the value of this key.
  • The pattern for matching key-value pairs is open: unmatched keys will be ignored even if they exist.
  • Key-value pair patterns will generate optimized code, with each key being queried at most once.

fn main {
  let map = @map.Map::[ ("a", 1) ]
  match map {
    // Match when `map` contains "b",
    // and bind the value of "b" in `map` to `y`.
    { "b": Some(y) } => println(y)
    // Match when `map` does not contain "b" but contains "a",
    // and bind the value of "a" to `k`.
    { "b": None, "a": Some(k) } => println(k)
    // The compiler warns that the case { "b": None, "a": None } is not matched.
  }
  // Output: 1
}

• Allow omitting the newtype constructor when type information is known.

type A Int

pub fn op_add(self : A, other : A) -> A {
  self.0 + other.0 // omit the constructor
}

fn main {
  A::A(0) + 1 |> ignore // omit the constructor of 1
  let _c : A = 0 + 1 + 2
}

Build System Update

• Configuration file options are converted to kebab-case (we'll still support snake_case for a while).

{
  "is-main": true,
  "test-import": []
}

• Wasm, Wasm-GC: The backend supports specifying the exported memory name (default is moonbit.memory) and compile options (e.g., -no-block-params for compatibility with the Binaryen toolchain) in moon.pkg.json.

{ 
 "link": {
  "wasm": {
  "export-memory-name": "custom_memory_name",
  "flags": ["-no-block-params"]
 },
}

• moon check adds a --deny-warn option, treating warnings as failures and returning a non-zero exit code.
• Optimized the execution speed of moon fmt and moon info.
• moon fmt adds a --check option to check if the current code is formatted.

Core Update

• Added an experimental library moonbitlang/x for developing and testing packages with unstable APIs. Once packages in moonbitlang/x are stable, we will select important packages to merge into moonbitlang/core based on community feedback.
  • num, time, uuid, and json5 have all been moved to moonbitlang/x.
• The Bytes API moved from the Int type to the Byte type.

fn Bytes::op_get(self : Bytes, index : Int) -> Byte
fn Bytes::op_set(self : Bytes, index : Int, value : Byte) -> Unit
fn Bytes::length(self : Bytes) -> Int
fn Bytes::make(len : Int, ~init : Byte = b'\x00') -> Bytes