Skip to content

Version 4.1 Release Notes

Link version 4.1 is distributed with Dyalog APL version 20.0 and is supported with version 19.0. You can select documentation for other versions of Link using the dropdown in the title bar.

Apart from these release notes and minor corrections to the documentation, the documentation for version 4.1 is identical to 4.0. Version 4.1 is primarily a bug fix release. A couple of significant groups of fixes are discussed below, and the version 4.1 milestone on GitHub documents the full set of issues that are resolved by version 4.1.

Control Reformatting

In addition to fixes, Link 4.1 recognises a new environment setting ALWAYSREFORMAT, which turns on automatic reformatting of all source code as it is written to source files. The following values are accepted:

  • ALWAYSREFORMAT=0: Do not reformat the source code
  • ALWAYSREFORMAT=1: Reformat using standard tab settings (4), as returned by (61 ⎕ATX)
  • ALWAYSREFORMAT=2: Use user-configured tab settings, as returned by ⎕CR or ⎕NR.

Link.Create ignores local names

Link.Create ignores calling functions and names localised by such functions when determining whether the target namespace is empty. This makes it much possible to a write a startup function that creates a link to the root namespace (#) when an application starts.

Ealier versions of Link would complain that the target namespace is not empty.

Link.Create -preloaded Allows Optimised Development Environments

If an application uses thousands (or tens of thousands) of source files, Link.Create can take a a significant amount of time. The -preloaded switch allows you to build a development workspace using Link.Create, and save this workspace or export the contents to a shared code file. At the start of a development session, you can call Link.Create with the -preloaded switch, which will re-establish all metadata related to the link, but skip loading the source code.

Significant fixes

Improved Error Messages

Several error messages have been improved. For example, when a file cannot be imported to a classic interpreter due to a TRANSLATION ERROR, the file and the offending character is identified.

Improved File System Watcher

The most significant improvement in version 4.1 is a complete rewrite of the code that handles file system watcher events, which increased the performance and the robustness of Link, when faced with several more or less simultaneous file updates.

For example, when using a source code management system like Git, a branch switch or a revert operation may cause a flurry of change to files. In Link 4.0, this could sometimes lead to functions disappearing, or failing to disappear when they should, as a result of processing messages in the wrong order.

Although Link 4.1 is very much more robust than Link 4.0 in this regard, it is still not recommended to copy or unzip hundreds or thousands of files with an active file system watcher.