v0.5.0

Added

• The distributed database backend is enabled in the RTS
  • this was previously a build time flag
  • it is now run time configuration via --rts-ddb-host and --rts-ddb-port
  • see examples/count for a demo and instructions
• RTS now has a --rts-verbose argument to make it more chatty
• General evaluation of expressions in a boolean context
  • explicit boolean expressions were already supported and working
  • however, in Python any expression can be evaluated in a boolean context
    which was not properly supported... and it now is!
  • this could be considered a bug fix, like it should go under "Fixed" but it
    is big enough of a thing to warrant being here... almost like new
    functionality, although we probably did intend to support this all along
• Description of development workflow, see docs/development_workflow.md
• A short guide on how to wrap C libraries for use in Acton, see
  docs/wrapping_c_libraries.md
• time.time() function
  • returns the current system time in nanoseconds as an integer
  • time is a new module
• random.randint() function
  • random is a new module
• acton.rts.sleep() function
  • from a user perspective acts just like Pythons time.sleep()
  • it uses usleep in C which means it actually sleeps the RTS thread
    executing the actor
    • this is typically a bad thing - we just want to sleep an actor, not the
      RTS thread
    • there are however use cases, like when implementing benchmarking or
      similar.
    • this is why it is under acton.rts and not in time
  • acton.rts is a new module

Changed

• Refactored Makefile structure to complete DAG
  • use a single top level Makefile rather than recursive Makefiles
  • only matters if you are doing development on Acton itself
  • backend, being enough of a standalone piece, still has its own Makefile
• actonc --hgen and actonc --cgen now outputs only code
  • easier to pipe directly to a file
  • compilation command not included, now available with actonc --ccmd
• actonc argument --path is now called --syspath
  • it is the system path and was already referred to as syspath internally
• The build output, when building Acton itself, is now placed in dist
  • makes it considerably easier to produce a release by tarring up its content
  • release size has been reduced to almost half by avoiding unnecessary files
  • the top level directories, like modules is now a source directory and no
    longer "the working directory of actonc"
• Source code of several modules have been moved from separate subdirs, like
  math and time, into modules/. Less top level clutter!

Fixed

• Improved dependency declaration for backend
  • Only matters if you are building Acton yourself and making changes to the
    backend database