Ann: SWI-Prolog 8.5.10

[jan]

Dear SWI-Prolog user,

SWI-Prolog 8.5.10 is ready for download. Thanks to work by @mgondan1,
@peter.ludemann and @ridgeworks a lot of improvements have been made,
notably on portability and avoiding memory leaks. Unfortunately some of
this is rather involved and some regression is likely. Highlights:

• Support for pcre2 (Perl Regular Expressions) seems pretty much
  stable now.
• Windows support is continuously being improved. This involves
  compiling SWI-Prolog on Windows, fixing several issues and making
  the test suite more portable.
• Several (small) memory leaks have been fixed.
• The term//2 non-terminal that implements “write to HTML” has
  been updated significantly. This is used by SWISH in JavaScript
  and CSS to provide vertical and smart layout for terms.
• library(http/jquery) now bundles jQuery 3.6.0 (was 1.11.3) if
  it does not reuse jQuery from the OS.

Some regressions due to recent changes have been fixed:

• clp(rq) was broken after making its internal module names more
  unique.
• swipl-ld[.exe] was broken (didn’t pass -I for SWI-Prolog’s
  include directory).
• on_signal/3 was broken for signals bound to Prolog callbacks.

Some release remarks:

• When doing an incremental build from source, call cmake
  one time as below to reconfigure jQuery and pcre dependencies.

  cmake -U 'JQUERY*' -U 'PCRE*' .
  

• A pull request was submitted to the official Docker images to
  upgrade swipl:devel to 8.5.10.

• Considering the scope of recent changes, once this line of
  work stabalizes it will not be backported to 8.4. Instead
  we will move to 8.6/8.7.

  Enjoy — Jan

SWI-Prolog Changelog since version 8.5.9

• FIXED: read_term/2: memory leak when reading Unicode variable names
  and reporting these using the variable_names(Names) option.

• DOC: Updated clause/2.

• FIXED: Memory leak reading Unicode queries at the toplevel.
  Peter Ludemann.

• ADDED: library(sandbox): support predicate_property/2

• DOC: PL_atom_wchars(): wrong types

• ADDED: library(sandbox): functor/4.

• FIXED: Windows (swipl-win.exe) clean closing of I/O.

• FIXED: Possible wrong Windows drive letter normalisation.

• PORT: msys2, detect libdb-6.0.dll from libdb.a

• PORT: Msys2/clang64

• PORT: MSYS2/clang64 the dll name appears several times in the “.a”
  file, select the first appearance

• FIXED: PL_retry() and PL_context() to work with all integers.

• FIXED: swipl-ld didn’t pass -I for SWI-Prolog.h any more.

• PORT: float_fractional_part/1 function: work around broken modf()
  in MinGW

• FIXED: on_signal/3: properly set flags on the signal structure such
  that when bound to a predicate the predicate is called synchronously.
  Breaks handling SIGTERM in library(http/http_unix_daemon).

• PORT: Sopenmem() to use SIO_NL_POSIX. All internal strings use
  POSIX \n to delimit lines. @mgodan1.

• FIXED: copy_term/4 to handle cyclic terms for the first argument.
  Also proper recovery in case of a memory overflow.

• DOC: Enhance docs for trap/1.

• DOC: Start disclaimer on float precision.

• FIXED: Added new test files,

• PORT: Work around broken llround in MinGW

• TEST: Added test framework and some initial tests for source code
  position and breakpoint management testing.

• DOC: open/3,4 pipe(Command) limitations.

• TEST: Moved pipe tests to a plunit file.

• PORT: open/3,4 on Windows: use clib popen() instead of the broken
  emulation in src/os/windows/popen.c

• FIXED: Clause position management for h => X = ..., rest_body:
  the unification is not inlined.

Package clib

• TEST: Disable CGI test for Windows because environment variables set
  using Prolog setenv/2 are not visible in the CRT runtime function
  getenv(). This either requires updating the CGI module to use the
  Win32 environment API or start a new process for reading the CGI input.

• TEST: Cross-platform null in stream_input

Package clpqr

• FIXED: Missed module rename for attribute_goals//1. Reported by
  Paul Bredbury.

Package http

• PORT: Make CGI tests succeed on Windows. @mgodan1

• UPDATED: Bundled jquery from jquery-1.11.3 to 3.6.0.

Package pcre

• TESTS: Fixed tests to work on systems without pcre2 jit

• DEBUG: Removed debugging prints. The print statement in the
  pcre_release() function is unsave as during proces cleanup the pattern
  may vanish before the regular expression.

• FIXED: Make comparison and printing the blob work for Unicode patterns.

• ENHANCED: re_config/1 backtracks through all possible values
  re_config/1 fails if an invalid otption is given instead of throwing
  an error fixed some PCRE1 vs PCRE2 documentation for re_config/1 added
  a test to check that re_config/1’s documentation is a complete list
  comparison now uses the pattern; blob-write also shows pattern fix
  bug in compare_pcres() that incorrectly resulted in equality

• FIXED: memory leak if re_compile fails or throws an error

Package pengines

• ENHANCED: term//2 for rendering terms as HTML has many new options
  and provides HTML that is easier to deal with using JavaScript and CSS.

Package semweb

• PORT: msys2/clang64, Release, avoid unused warning

[mgondan1]

mgondan1, not mgodan

[jan]

Sorry, edited.