Gawk Roadmap

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

Where We Are Now

Gawk 4.2.0 is the current release. The manual was published at the beginning of 2015 as the fourth edition of Effective awk Programming.

Volunteer needed: I would love to find someone to build gawk with Visual Studio (at least VS 2012) under Windows and maintain a native Win32 version.

Some nice things have happened for the 4.2 version:

• Fix some of the problems with comments in the pretty printer in the master branch. This is mostly done; some work on the code for switch statements remains, but may not be done before I release.
• We now have strongly typed regexp constants.
• There is a new typeof() function.
• Regex support was added to the API.
• Additional API work from dev team was done.
• The support code was moved into a separate directory.
• We improved the regex matching by caching two copies of each compiled regex, one for IGNORECASE, one for regular.
• Suport for MPFR access was added to the API.
• Lots of other good stuff, see the NEWS file.

What's Next

Things to do:

• Use RapidJSON to write an extension that dumps arrays to JSON and reads them back in from JSON. This would also be a great test of writing an extension in C++. This is DONE, and in gawkextlib. It will included in Fedora 28!
• 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.
• Do a deep dive on how git is used in the project. This has been started and the document is available in the master branch.
• 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.

Here are some ideas that have been floating around amongst the development team:

• Think about some sort of namespace mechanism for variables and/or functions in modules. WIP in the features/namespaces branch.
• More code review and clean-up.

Bookkeeping

Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017 Arnold David Robbins. All Rights Reserved.

First started: 19 December, 2009.

Last updated: 14 December, 2017.