Compiler ยท Apr 16, 2018

Announcing BuckleScript 3.0

Hongbo Zhang
Compiler Team

New Changes

bs-platform 3.0.0 is released! Go get it. This is a great release.

Highlighted features:

  • OCaml/Reason boolean are finally compiled as JS boolean! Due to historical limitations, OCaml true/false was compiled to 1/0 in JS. This caused quite a bit of confusion for newcomers. It now compiles to JS true/false. Special thanks to Cristiano for all the hard work.

  • New object type feature. This is an experimental and potentially much better way to bind to JS objects that potentially obsoletes the need for a few other APIs. Please see the linked docs and help us test it!

  • raw now accepts a function declaration with an unsafe string body: let f = [%raw (a, b) => "return a + b"] (OCaml syntax: let f = [%raw fun a b -> "return a + b"]). This makes embedding escape-hatch raw JS code even easier for the compiler to optimize for speed and readability, as you've indicated that the raw code block is a function, with specific numbers of arguments.

The usual changelog is here.

We've been working on the BuckleScript compiler for almost four years now; meanwhile, the OCaml type checker itself has already been engineered for almost three decades. After all this of work, we believe that BuckleScript has reached a stable and reliable stage.

Below is a list of to-dos that we will work on in the future. Suggestions welcome!

  • Upgrade the OCaml version. OCaml is quite a stable language; there are not too many changes between BuckleScript's OCaml version and latest stable one. Nonetheless, it's good to keep up with the OCaml ecosystem.

  • A uniform representation for local modules/global modules. Currently local modules are compiled to array, while global modules are compiled to ES6/CommonJS/AMD modules (the cost of local modules is low though, thanks to aggressive inlining).

  • Continue improving Belt. Some initial nice numbers here.

  • Enhance FFI to allow creation of idiomatic, type safe JS classes.

  • Introduce a debug mode to enhance the printing of OCaml data structures.

  • Performance. The compiler performance and generation of more performant and readable code is always our top concern.

Thank you for all the support so far!

This article was originally released on https://bucklescript.github.io/blog/2018/04/16/release-3-0-0
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