Ann: SWI-Prolog 8.3.26

[jan]

Dear SWI-Prolog user,

SWI-Prolog 8.3.26 is ready for download. Highlights

• Better integration of transactions: proper coordination of the
  notion of the last modified generation of predicates, interaction
  with thread_wait/2 and interaction with incremental and monotonic
  tables.

• Next steps of code refactoring by @dmchurch: split the monolitic
  C header file into smaller header files that match the C modules
  and change the default symbol visibility for libswipl to hide all
  symbols that are not defined in SWI-Prolog.h or SWI-Stream.h.

• Several small fixes, mostly addressing portability issues. In part
  as a result of the above refactoring and in part due to the first
  steps towards CI at SWI-Prolog Continuous integration status

  Enjoy — Jan

P.s. Also submitted a PR for the official Docker image.

SWI-Prolog Changelog since version 8.3.25

• FIXED: Accidentally left debug test that could lead to an “Too many
  stacked strings” fatal error.

• FIXED: Monotonic table that depends on a monotonic table that has
  forced reevaluation due to a retract and a normal monotonic table.

• ADDED: PL_get_uint64() and PL_get_uint64_ex() API functions for
  consistency.

• ENHANCED: nb_setarg/3 to only copy for a compound term

• ADDED: samkeysort/2 to SICStus 4 library(samsort) emulation.

• DOC: Tabling and transactions

• FIXED: Invalidate lazy monotonic tables when reevaluation inside a
  transaction introduces new dependencies on predicates modified inside
  the transaction.

• TEST: transactions and lazy monotonic tabling

• TEST: transaction and monotonic tabling

• ADDED: Consistency of eager monotonic tables over transactions.

• TEST: transactions and incremental tabling

• ADDED: Keep track of incremental tables that needs reevaluating when
  we rollback a transaction.

• MODIFIED: Interaction between thread_wait/2 and transactions: database
  changes do not wakeup threads that are in a transaction because the
  change is invisible anyway and thread_wait/2 cannot be called inside
  a transaction as nothing can cause a wakeup.

• ENHANCED: Avoid unnecessary wakeup in thread_wait/2 from modifications
  inside a transaction. Do notify on the transaction commit.

• CLEANUP: Make role of special transaction generations clear by using
  a macro for them.

• FIXED: last_modified_generation logic for predicates that are modified
  inside a transaction.

• BUILD: Single threaded version still requires pthread library on
  Windows as this is a dependency for the gcc runtime library.

• MODIFIED: Do not define rational/1 if rational number support is
  not enabled.

• FIXED: library(sandbox) to handle the possibility that rational/1 is
  not defined.

• TEST: Avoid rational number syntax errors when GMP is not used.

• ADDED: eol//0 to library(dcg/basics).

• FIXED: Build for single threading

• FIXED: missing GMP exports, -Wmissing-prototypes This addresses issues
  exposed by adding -Wmissing-prototypes to the build, hacked in as
  cmake -DCHECK_PROTOTYPES=1. This flag emits a warning when any
  non-static function is defined without first declaring a separate
  prototype, which usually means that either a header hasn’t been
  included, or that a function that should have been static wasn’t
  marked as such. The Linux compile is clean now, after having:

  • added static to functions not called outside the file
  • completed incomplete header prototypes, usually by adding (void)
  • removed old functions no longer called anywhere
  • included gmp.h before SWI-Prolog.h, to enable the missing GMP exports

  The Windows build still has some missing-prototype warnings because of
  various #ifdefs, but I’m not addressing those right now.

• MODIFIED: Moved includes to files that use them This also moves some
  inline definitions out of pl-inline.h, specifically those that call
  functions defined in other headers.

• FIXED: Changing _xos defs to function-like macros Fixes a compilation
  error in atom.c:1151, where a->type->write is transformed into
  a->type->_xos_write.

• MODIFIED: Refactoring to per-module header files

• BUILD: Changing default visibility to hidden. This makes portable
  shared library builds work like Windows DLL builds, i.e. all symbols
  are library-private rather than exported by default. This fixes a
  fair amount of symbol leakage that had been happening when functions
  and variables weren’t marked COMMON().

• BUILD: Fix possibly failing PGO build due to lacking dependency

• FIXED: optimise_unify Prolog flag was handled negated. Jan Burse.

• BUILD: Moved pl-alloc/index/fli out of pl-wam This adds USE_*_INLINES
  as a flag that can be set before including pl-incl.h, to include some
  of the function definitions from various files in a “can-inline”
  context. It also separates the majority of pl-alloc.c, pl-index.c,
  and pl-fli.c out into their own object files, to speed up the build.

  This may result in a slight (1-2% at max, in my testing) performance
  loss since the pl-wam compilation doesn’t have access to all the
  function definitions in those three files, but enabling LTO on the
  build (which I have not yet, since it currently generates warnings)
  avoids the performance drop entirely by allowing the linker itself
  to perform any applicable cross-file inlining.

• PORT: Avoid UTF-8 characters in source code.

• PORT: Avoid relying on GCC -Werror=missing-profile flag that is
  not supported on older systems.

Package bench

• FIXED: Avoid error when using without threads

• ADDED: Provide CSV output using swipl run.pl --csv

Package clib

• BUILD: Drop building and including libfary(time) in the single
  threaded version.

• PORT: uuid handling on CentOS 7

• PORT:Deal with CentOS7 broken uuid-config

Package http

• PORT: Start splitting parts that need threads and those that do not.

Package jpl

• TEST: Fix tests for bounded integers.

Package odbc

• PORT: Drop odbc_cancel_thread/1 when compiling without thread support.

Package pldoc

• ADDED: Include documented public/1 predicates in the default page.

Package protobufs

• PORT: Avoid UTF-8 in comment to allow building using non-UTF-8 locales.

Package redis

• TEST: Make tests work without rationl number support

Package semweb

• FIXED: Wrong argument type for PL_*_external() The SWI-Prolog.h
  external record functions use char * for the type of the
  external record data, but rdf_db is storing it and passing it as a
  record_t. Which went unnoticed when record_t was just a typedef
  for void *, but now causes (non-fatal) warnings during compilation,
  with the new opaque-struct-typed API header.

Package ssl

• PORT: Single threaded build.

Package xpce

• FIXED: Make PceEmacs Prolog mode work if rational number support is
  not enabled.

• FIXED: Dependencies when using with single threaded version.