Crystal 1.9.0 is released!

Johannes Müller
API Docs Changelog Source

We are delivering a new Crystal release with several bugfixes and improvements.

Pre-built packages are available on GitHub Releases and our official distribution channels. See crystal-lang.org/install for installation instructions.

Stats

This release includes 167 changes since 1.8.2 by 27 contributors. We thank all the contributors for all the effort put into improving the language! ❤️

Changes

Below we list the most remarkable changes in the language, compiler and stdlib. For more details, visit the changelog.

Breaking: Big number comparisons with floats

Comparisons of Big number types against floats were fixed to respect special values such as NAN. As a result, the implementation of the comparison operator #<=> between Big* (BigDecimal, BigFloat, BigInt, BigRational) and Float::Primitive (Float32, Float64) number types is now nilable. When invoking these comparisons, Nil values must be handled explicitly.

Windows

The compiler and standard library take a big step improving Windows support. Only few outstanding issues remain and we expect them to be resolved in the following months.

Most notable features are a GUI installer (available in the release artifacts) and dynamic linking of DLLs (currently available via compiler flag -Dpreview_dll).

More details and additional features are listed in a separate post about Windows support in Crystal 1.9.

Language

There are two new macros in the language:

  • ASTNode#warning is similar to #raise but only creates a warning (#13262).
  • ::print is similar to ::puts but without the trailing newline (#13336).

Standard library

Default interrupt handlers are now in place to trigger at_exit handlers if the process is interrupted (#13568).

Instead of a single boolean parameter, file matching behaviour of Dir.glob is controlled by File::MatchOptions with portable options (#13550).

The stdlib spec suite makes good use of the spec helper assert_prints and it’s now available for user specs as well (#13599).

There’s a new method Regex#match! with a non-nilable return type (Regex::MatchData) which is helpful if the regex is expected to match. regex.match!(x) is a convenient replacement for regex.match(x).not_nil! (#13285).

All methods accepting a Regex for matching now also have a parameter for Regex::MatchOptions (#13353).

Compiler

A new compiler command crystal clear_cache offers a convenient way to clean the compiler cache (#13553).

This release adds support for LLVM 16 (#13181).

The docs generator now features dark mode (#13512) and improved support for small viewports (#13515).

Deprecations

  • Dir.[] with match_hidden parameter: Use the overload with a match parameter instead.
  • Dir.glob with match_hidden parameter: Use the overload with a match parameter instead.
  • LLVM::Module#write_bitcode_with_summary_to_file: ThinLTO is no longer supported; use #write_bitcode_to_file instead.
  • LLVM::FunctionPassManager: The legacy pass manager was removed in LLVM 17. Use LLVM::PassBuilderOptions instead.
  • LLVM::FunctionPassManager::Runner: The legacy pass manager was removed in LLVM 17. Use LLVM::PassBuilderOptions instead.
  • LLVM::Module#new_function_pass_manager: The legacy pass manager was removed in LLVM 17. Use LLVM::PassBuilderOptions instead.
  • LLVM::ModulePassManager: The legacy pass manager was removed in LLVM 17. Use LLVM::PassBuilderOptions instead.
  • LLVM::PassManagerBuilder: The legacy pass manager was removed in LLVM 17. Use LLVM::PassBuilderOptions instead.
  • LLVM::PassRegistry: The legacy pass manager was removed in LLVM 17. Use LLVM::PassBuilderOptions instead.