Gawk Roadmap

This page is an unofficial, subject to change, work in progress, roadmap for gawk development.

Where We Are Now

Gawk 5.3.2 is the current release.

The manual was published at the beginning of 2015 as the fourth edition of Effective awk Programming. I hope one day to do a fifth edtion.

Volunteer needed: I would love to find someone to build gawk with Visual Studio under Windows and maintain a native Windows version.

Things to do:

Make a release using the MinRX regular expression matcher. This should happen before the end of 2025.

Things that may never happen:

Rework memory handling to use atom tables for strings, wide strings, and compiled regex data structures. Keep a percentage of unreferenced items per table and do a cleanup scan when that gets hit.
Look at the code in the old-extension directory to get a handle on what it does, and then try to integrate it into the code base and document how to use it. It is an old-style extension that allows supplying user-defined functions to be called when certain array operations are performed. But the code is somewhat twisty. I will probably have to do this.

First started: 19 December, 2009.

Last updated: 11 September, 2025.