Standard ML of New Jersey
Release Notes

Version 110.87
May 3, 2019
SML/NJ HOME

https://smlnj.org

FILES

https://smlnj.org/dist/working/110.87/

Summary

This release completes the overhaul of primitive operators in the compiler that was started in 110.86. Most of the changes listed here were part of the 110.86 release, but we include them here since 110.86 was not officially announced.

Details

Installation

While the installer for 110.87 works on macOS 10.14 Mojave, building from source requires some extra steps.

SML/NJ Library

Renamed the function CharBufferPP.openOut to openBuf, and added the TextPP structure that supports pretty printing to either an output stream (like TextIOPP) or a character buffer (like CharBufferPP).

ASDL

Further improvements to the new implementation of ASDL.

  • The interface to file and memory picklers was unified for the SML view.

  • Added support for S-Expression pickling for the SML view (unpickling has not yet been implemented).

  • Significant editing of the documentation to make it more accurately reflect the implementation.

Compiler

110.86 changes

We have made a number of changes to internal representations and implementations as part of the preparation for supporting 64-bit targets. We summarize these below (see the change log for details).

  • Moved CPS related code out of the FLINT directory and into its own compiler/CPS directory tree.

  • Split out the utility code from the CPS structure into a new CPSUtil structure.

  • Renamed the various CPS primitive constructors so as to be compatible with ASDL (i.e., changed symbolic and lower-case constructor names to upper-case identifiers).

  • Moved the F_SGN constructor from the fcmp datatype to the branch datatype (and renamed it FSGN).

  • Many changes to the internal representation of primitive operators.

We have also made improvements to the core 64-bit arithmetic operations.

Culled unused flags from the Control structure (mostly from Control.CG).

110.87 changes

In 110.87, we continue the overhaul of the compiler’s handling of primitive operations by introducing a new, more consistent, naming scheme for the operations that are exposed by the compiler in the InLine structure. In particular, we have abstracted away from the size of the default integer and word types (both in the names and in the semantics of numeric conversions).

The compiler now inlines the Char.chr operator.

Interactive System

The implementation of the use function in the REPL has been rewritten to fix bugs 193, 217, and 219. The semantics of use are as follows:

  • If an invocation of use encounters a compilation error (either in the initial file or in a nested invocation of use), then the compiler error message will be printed and the call to use will immediately return ().

  • If an invocation of use raises an exception during execution of the compiled code (either in the initial file or in a nested invocation of use), then the exception will be reported at the top-level.

  • Otherwise, if no errors or uncaught exceptions are encountered, then () will be returned once the code in the used file has executed.

Note that any change to the global state or environment that occurs before an error is encountered, will not be rolled back. Also, wrapping calls to use in exception handlers or using callcc in combination with use may break it.

Files specified as command-line arguments to the sml command are treated as if use was invoked on them. If there is an error, then the error is reported and the sml command will terminate with a non-zero exit status (at least on Unix).

Bugs

Here is a list of tracked bugs fixed (or closed) with this release, please see the bug tracker for more details.

193

SML/NJ does not print unhandled exceptions in loaded files

213

Int32.div raises Div instead of Overflow when dividing minInt by ~1

217

Unhandled exceptions no longer print anything when inside used file

219

"use" fails silently when a function inside a structure raises an exception

The following unnumbered bugs were also fixed:

  • The Word32.toInt function did not raise Overflow when given an argument with its sign bit set in some cases (e.g., Word32.toInt 0wx8002DE32; would return 187954).

Supported systems

We believe that SML/NJ will build and run on the following systems, but have only tested some of them:

Architecture Operating System Status

Power PC

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

AIX

 

Sparc

Solaris

Linux

 

x86 (32-bit)

Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)

Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)

Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)

Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)

macOS 10.12 (Sierra)

Tested

macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)

Tested

macOS 10.14 (Mojave)

Tested

Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Tested

Other Linux variants

BSD variants

Windows 7

Windows 10

Cygwin (32-bit)

A note about 64-bit support

Apple is in the process of deprecating 32-bit support in macOS. With macOS 10.14 Mojave, compiling 32-bit applications, such as the SML/NJ runtime system, requires using an older SDK. The SML/NJ installer, however, works without issue on macOS 10.14 Mojave.

We have been working on 64-bit support since 110.82 we expect to have it in place before the release of macOS 10.15.