what's new?
Here are four notable changes since the last release. In short, darcs is a bit faster and works better under Windows:
- Improvements in Windows support.
- Performance improvements in
darcs repair and robustness improvements in darcs check. - First stab at libdarcs — when building through Cabal, all of darcs implementation is now exposed in modules. No API guarantees whatsoever.
- Low-level optimisations in string handling and filesystem code.
There's a couple of cool new features and some bug fixes, 18 issues resolved overall. Please see the
release announcement for more details.
what comes next?
The next major release is scheduled for this July (that's 2009-07), with some nice performance enhancements in store.
The darcs team has been infected with the
benchmarking and hackathon habits. In our first darcs hacking sprint last October, we saw some interesting work on some long term improvements: a filename-to-patch cache to look patches up faster, and a notion of "packs" to reduce the effect of latency fetching files and patches over a network. We hope to continue this work in second hacking sprint and up to our next release.
Meanwhile, we may also be hosting a performance hacking contest to see what kinds of cool optimisations the darcs and Haskell communities can come up with.
In short, we'll be having a lot of fun making darcs faster for July. We hope you'll like the results!
