Gawk Roadmap

This page is an unofficial, subject to change, work in progress, roadmap for gawk development. Having this page is an experiment, I hope it will be a productive one.

It has been two months since I last updated this, so here goes.

Where We Are Now

• Gawk 4.0 has been released!
• The bug-gawk AT gnu.org address is now a real mailing list.

Volunteer needed: I would love to find someone to build gawk with Visual Studio (at least VS 2008) under Windows and maintain a native Win32 version.

What's Next

Here are some ideas that have been floating around in my head for a while:

• Merge gawk, pgawk and dgawk into one executable
• Improve or revamp the C API for dynamically loadable modules
• Provide a syntax instead of function call for loading modules
• Think about some sort of namespace mechanism for variables and/or functions in modules
• Add support for MPFR so that gawk can use infinite precision numbers. This is a big job. It involves at least the following
• Checking the use of zero and the null string everywhere
• Formatting for print and printf/sprintf
• Comparisons
• Conversions to/from string, to integer
• Deciding how to enable/disable this feature and whether it should be the default
  
• More code review and clean-up

Bookkeeping

Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011, Arnold David Robbins. All Rights Reserved.

First started: 19 December, 2009.

Last updated: 17 July, 2011.