Ceylon 1.3.0 is a major release of the Ceylon
language, with over 330 issues closed. This is the first
release of Ceylon which supports Android development,
the Node Package Manager (npm), and Wildfly Swarm.
For the JVM, this release is backwards-compatible with all
releases of Ceylon 1.2 (1.2.0 to 1.2.2).
For JavaScript, this release is backwards-compatible only
with the previous release (1.2.2).
Ceylon IDE 1.3.0 is now available for the two leading Java
development environments:
Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ was designed for high performance
in large projects with many Java dependencies, and is currently
the best-performing IDE for Ceylon.
Changes
Enhancements to the language and command-line distribution
include:
Naturally, the release incorporates many more bugfixes,
minor enhancements, and performance improvements.
Support for Docker
Docker images for Ceylon
are now available, making it very easy to run Ceylon programs
in a Docker container.
IDE Changes
Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ is a brand-new development tool for
IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, featuring incremental error
reporting, code completion, basic refactoring,
many intention actions, sophisticated navigation, searching,
type hierarchy and file structure, online documentation,
full integration with Ceylon Herd and much, much more.
Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ is written mostly in Ceylon, and
reuses the Ceylon IDE Common project, the core of
Ceylon IDE for Eclipse, which was completely rewritten
in Ceylon.
Almost 60 issues were fixed in Ceylon IDE for Eclipse,
and code completion was redesigned around a non-blocking
approach which is much more responsive in large projects.
In addition, improvements to the typechecker have resulted
in significantly lower memory usage.
SDK Changes
Exactly 40 issues affecting the Ceylon SDK have been fixed.
Migration from Ceylon 1.2.2
Ceylon 1.3.0 is backward-compatible with Ceylon 1.2.2, and
so it's not necessary to recompile or change dependencies.
However, upgrading to version 1.3.0 of any Ceylon platform
module is recommended.
About Ceylon
Ceylon is a modern, modular, statically typed programming
language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. The
language features a flexible and very readable syntax, a
unique and uncommonly elegant static type system, a powerful
module architecture, and excellent tooling, including an
awesome IDE supporting both IntelliJ IDEA and the Eclipse
platform.
Ceylon enables the development of cross-platform modules
that execute portably in both virtual machine environments.
Alternatively, a Ceylon module may target one or the other
platform, in which case it may interoperate with native code
written for that platform.
In the box
This release includes:
- a complete language specification that defines the
syntax and semantics of Ceylon in language accessible to
the professional developer,
- a command line toolset including compilers for
Java and JavaScript, a documentation compiler, a test
runner, a WAR archive packager, a "fat" JAR packager, and
support for executing modular programs on the JVM and
Node.js,
- a powerful module architecture for code organization,
dependency management, and module isolation at runtime,
which also supports interoperation with OSGi, Jigsaw,
Maven, and npm, and
- the language module, our minimal,
cross-platform, foundation-level API.
Available separately:
- updated versions of the platform modules that comprise the
Ceylon SDK,
- a code formatter as a plugin for the
ceylon command,
- a plugin for the
ceylon command that supports
compilation and execution for the Dart VM, and
- two full-featured integrated development environments: for
Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.
Language
Ceylon is a highly understandable object-oriented language
with static typing. The language features:
- an emphasis upon readability and a strong bias toward
omission or elimination of potentially-harmful or
potentially-ambiguous constructs and toward highly
disciplined use of static types,
- an extremely powerful and uncommonly elegant type system
combining subtype and parametric polymorphism with:
- first-class union and intersection types,
- both declaration-site and use-site variance, and
- the use of principal types for local type inference
and flow-sensitive typing,
- a unique treatment of function and tuple types,
enabling powerful abstractions, along with the most
elegant approach to
null of any modern language,
- first-class constructs for defining modules and
dependencies between modules,
- a very flexible syntax including comprehensions and
support for expressing tree-like structures,
-
fully-reified generic types, on both the JVM and
JavaScript virtual machines, and a unique typesafe
metamodel.
More information about these language features may be
found in the feature list and
quick introduction.
Source code
The source code for Ceylon, its specification, and its website,
is freely available from GitHub.
Information about Ceylon's open source licenses is available
here.
Issues
Bugs and suggestions may be reported in GitHub's
issue tracker.
Acknowledgement
Gavin King, Stéphane Épardaud, Tako Schotanus,
Tom Bentley, David Festal, Enrique Zamudio,
Bastien Jansen, Emmanuel Bernard, Aleš Justin,
Tomáš Hradec, James Cobb, Ross Tate,
Max Rydahl Andersen, Mladen Turk, Lucas Werkmeister,
Roland Tepp, Diego Coronel, Matej Lazar,
John Vasileff, Toby Crawley, Julien Viet,
Loic Rouchon, Stephane Gallès, Ivo Kasiuk,
Corbin Uselton, Paco Soberón, Michael Musgrove,
Daniel Rochetti, Henning Burdack, Luke deGruchy,
Rohit Mohan, Griffin DeJohn, Casey Dahlin,
Gilles Duboscq, Tomasz Krakowiak, Alexander Altman,
Alexander Zolotko, Alex Szczuczko, Andrés G. Aragoneses,
Anh Nhan Nguyen, Brice Dutheil, Carlos Augusto Mar,
Charles Gould, Chris Gregory, klinger,
Martin Voelkle, Mr. Arkansas, Paŭlo Ebermann,
Vorlent, Akber Choudhry, Renato Athaydes,
Flavio Oliveri, Michael Brackx, Brent Douglas,
Lukas Eder, Markus Rydh, Julien Ponge,
Pete Muir, Nicolas Leroux, Brett Cannon,
Geoffrey De Smet, Guillaume Lours, Gunnar Morling,
Jeff Parsons, Jesse Sightler, Oleg Kulikov,
Raimund Klein, Sergej Koščejev, Chris Marshall,
Simon Thum, Maia Kozheva, Shelby,
Aslak Knutsen, Fabien Meurisse, Sjur Bakka,
Xavier Coulon, Ari Kast, Dan Allen,
Deniz Türkoglu, F. Meurisse, Jean-Charles Roger,
Johannes Lehmann, allentc, Nikolay Tsankov,
Chris Horne, Gabriel Mirea, Georg Ragaller,
Harald Wellmann, Oliver Gondža, Stephen Crawley,
Byron Clark, Francisco Reverbel, Jonas Berlin,
Luke Hutchison, Nikita Ostroumov, Santiago Rodriguez,
Sean Flanigan, Schalk W. Cronjé.