Upcoming Crystal 1.8 Release

News Official
1

The next Crystal 1.8 release is scheduled for April 12.

As usual, this is precluded by a two-weeks freeze period starting this week March 29. We’ll be using this time to consolidate the release and only bug fixes will be merged. We appreciate any report of regressions caused by our latest nightly builds.

:warning: Take into consideration that this version is scheduled to change the default regex engine.

The current HEAD of the master branch serves as a preview of the release. You can obtain pre-release builds from current nightlies or build directly from master.

Nightly builds are available from these locations:

Nightlies can also be easily used in GitHub Actions with the install-crystal action.

More detailed instructions on Install Nightly Builds - The Crystal Programming Language

19 Likes
2

Compile on latest master 1.8 serials with LLVM 15 today.

No perceivable performance gain when development build compare to 1.7.2 which build with LLVM 14 on a toy lucky sample project.

1 Like
3

I’ve been testing some of my projects with the latest 1.8 code on x86-64 and aarch64 and haven’t found any issues yet. I’m stuck on LLVM 13 on x86-64 and LLVM 14 on aarch64 for the foreseeable future, however, so I can’t test the opaque pointer changes.

2 Likes
4

The release is delayed due to a last-minute issue with PCRE2: Performance regression in `crystal docs` · Issue #13306 · crystal-lang/crystal · GitHub

We’re working on it and expect the release to happen soon.

6 Likes
5

I’m seeing about a 10% build-time improvement to one of my services when making small changes (using sentry to compile after every file change):

1.7.3

real 0m2.452s
user 0m2.316s
sys  0m0.526s

Nightly

real 0m2.190s
user 0m2.028s
sys  0m0.517s
4 Likes