Swan Lake Beta1

Overview of Ballerina Swan Lake Beta1

This is the first beta release leading up to the Ballerina Swan Lake GA release.

It introduces the new language features planned for the Swan Lake GA release and includes improvements and bug fixes done to the compiler, runtime, standard library, and developer tooling after the Swan Lake Alpha5 release.

Updating Ballerina

If you are already using Ballerina, use the Ballerina update tool to directly update to Ballerina Swan Lake Beta1.

First, run the command below to update the update tool to its latest version.

bal update

If your update tool is below version 0.8.14, use the ballerina update command.

Next, run the command below to update to Swan Lake Beta1.

bal dist pull slbeta1

Installing Ballerina

If you have not installed Ballerina, then download the installers to install.

Language updates

Improvements

  • Worker deadlock detection has been improved to include the wait action.
  • The self variable of an isolated object no longer needs to be accessed within a lock statement unless it is used to access a field that is either not final or is of a type that is not a subtype of readonly or isolated object {}.
  • The lang.xml:strip() function does not mutate an XML value. Therefore, using the lang.xml:strip() function on immutable XML values is allowed.

Breaking changes

  • An included record parameter of a function can only be specified after any required and/or defaultable parameters of the function.

  • Additive expressions and multiplicative expressions are no longer supported with numeric values when the static types of the operands belong to different numeric basic types.

  • Configurable variables are implicitly final now. Moreover, the type of such a variable is now effectively the intersection of the specified type and readonly. Therefore, configurable variables no longer support the final and isolated qualifiers.

  • Type narrowing will no longer take place for captured variables of an anonymous function since the narrowed type cannot be guaranteed during the execution of the function.

  • Type narrowing will now be reset after a compound assignment.

  • Worker message passing after waiting for the same worker has been disallowed.

  • When a named worker is used in a wait action, it can no longer be used in a variable reference anywhere else.

  • When the type-descriptor is ambiguous, it is parsed according to the following table in which the precedence is specified in decreasing order. For example, A & B | C is considered to be (A & B) | C.

    OperatorAssociativity
    distinct T
    T[ ]
    T1 & T2left
    T1 | T2left
    function (args) returns Tright

  • The Taint analyzer is disabled and the --taint-check option is removed. The annotations @tainted and @untainted were left intact as placeholders for backward compatibility. Any script that used to pass the --taint-check option to the bal run or bal build commands will fail.

Bug fixes

To view bug fixes, see the GitHub milestone for Swan Lake Beta1.

Runtime updates

Improvements

Improved configurable variables to support enum types

Values can be provided for configurable variables of enum types via command-line arguments and a TOML file.

public enum HttpVersion {
    HTTP_1_1,
    HTTP_2
}

configurable HttpVersion httpVersion = ?;

The value for httpVersion can be provided via the Config.toml file or as a command-line argument as shown below.

[configUnionTypes]
httpVersion = "HTTP_1_1"

The command-line argument will be as shown below.

-ChttpVersion=HTTP_1_1

Improved configurable variables to support map types

The configurable feature is improved to support variables of map types. Values can be provided via a TOML file.

For example, if the map-typed configurable variables are defined in the following way,

configurable map admin = ?;

type HttpResponse record {|
    string method;
    string httpVersion = "HTTP_1_0";
    map headers;
|};

configurable HttpResponse response = ?;
configurable map[] users = ?;

the values can be provided in the Config.toml as follows.

[admin]
username = "John Doe"
mail = "John@hotmail.com"
location = "LK"

[response]
method = "POST"
httpVersion = "HTTP_2_0"
headers.Status = "200 OK"
headers.Content-Type = "text/html"

[[users]]
username = "Jack"
location = "UK"

[[users]]
username = "Jane"
location = "US"

Breaking changes

  • The io.ballerina.runtime.api.types.Type#getName and io.ballerina.runtime.api.types.Type#getQualifiedName methods now return an empty string if no name was associated with the type. The io.ballerina.runtime.api.types.Type#toString method can be used to get the string representation of a type.
  • Wait actions that wait for expressions that are not named workers can return errors now. The eventual type of such wait future expressions is now T|error where T is the type of the original return value.

Bug fixes

To view bug fixes, see the GitHub milestone for Swan Lake Beta1.

Standard library updates

New features

graphql package

  • Added declarative auth configuration
  • Added support for optional types as inputs
  • Added support for returning unions of distinct service objects
  • Added support for inline fragments
  • Added support for enums as input values

Improvements

cache package

Marked the cache:Cache class as an isolated class.

file package

Marked the file:Listener class as an isolated class.

graphql package

  • Improved introspection validation and execution
  • Added missing fields in the GraphQL types
  • Improved the compiler plugin to validate inputs and return types
  • Added support to use included record parameters instead of the record type in the listener initialization

http package

  • Improved the http:Client remote methods to support inferring the target type from the contextually-expected type
  • Changed the listeners and clients to use include record parameters as configuration parameters
  • Populated the error detail of http:ClientRequestError and http:RemoteServerError with the response payload and the headers
  • Swapped the mediaType and headers arguments in the client remote methods

sql package

  • Added the SQL Array Value type support and introduced the new distinct array value types for identified SQL types
  • Marked the sql:Client class as an isolated class

websubhub package

Included the auth configuration in the WebSubHub publisher client configuration.

Bug fixes

To view bug fixes, see the GitHub milestone for Swan Lake Beta1.

Code to Cloud updates

New Features

Added the @cloud:Expose annotation to support custom listeners.

Bug fixes

To view bug fixes, see the GitHub milestone for Swan Lake Beta1 of the repositories below.

Developer tools updates

Improvements

Debugger

  • Added remote debugging support for the command that runs the Ballerina executable JAR
  • Added support for debugging a single Ballerina test in Visual Studio Code

Test framework

Introduced a flag to pass the expected code coverage report formats

Bug fixes

To view bug fixes, see the GitHub milestone for Swan Lake Beta1 of the repositories below.