Breaking: Exit on pipe error

Crystal processes exit immediately when writing to STDOUT or STDERR fails with EPIPE. This closely resembles the default behaviour of the SIGPIPE signal. Previously, the failing write would raise IO::Error, which typically prints an error message and exits. This error message is now removed (#17335).

You can opt out of this behaviour with STDOUT.exit_on_broken_pipe = false.

Thanks, @straight-shoota

Constants with type declarations

Constants can have type declarations (#16951). They work exactly as you would expect the combination of constants and type declarations to be.

module Foo
  BAR : Int32 = 1
  BAZ : String = ""
  QUX : Int64 = 123 # autocasts 123 to Int64
end

Thanks, @stakach

aarch64-linux promoted to Tier 1

The targets aarch64-linux-gnu and aarch64-linux-musl moved from Tier 2 to Tier 1. The only missing piece was that we were lacking official builds, but we have that since 1.19.

Breaking: Process.fork removed

Process.fork had been deprecated sine before 1.0 and now we finally removed it (#17367)

Thanks, @straight-shoota

New Macros

• New macros enable more text operations at compile time: StringLiteral#bytesize (#17176), NumberLiteral#chr (#17169) and RangeLiteral#each supports CharLiteral (#17170)

Thanks, @straight-shoota

Compiler

New constants Crystal::ALL_FLAGS and Crystal::USER_FLAGS provide access to the compile time flags (#17392).

Thanks, @straight-shoota

DWARF refactor

We completely revamped DWARF parsing to enhance performance and reduce memory usage. The DWARF parser now scans sections on demand (#17283) and builds an efficient index table once (#17410, #17455), which results in blazingly fast look ups. Decoded backtrace lines are cached in an LRU cache (#17285).

Also added aupport for DWARF 5 features DW_FORM_addrx<n> and DW_FORM_strx<n> (#17445).

Thanks, @ysbaddaden

HTTP improvements

We merged numerous improvements and bug fixes for HTTP.

• #remote_address and #local_address moved from HTTP::Request to HTTP::Context (#17196)
• Add HTTP::Headers#merge (#17326)
• Serialize IO::Memory in HTTP body with Content-Length header (#17388)

Bug fixes:

• Reject unrecognized HTTP Transfer-Encoding header (#17140), invalid Content-Encoding (#17262), and invalid HTTP trailer (#17337)
• [breaking] Fix the return values of HTTP::Request#body= and #content_length= (#17257, #17273)
• Fix HTTP.parse_headers_and_body to not raise with without_zlib (#17272)
• Validate properties of HTTP::WebSocketHandler (#17235), HTTP::Request (#17255,#17304, #17374, #17310, #17312, #17258), HTTP::Headers name (#17317)
• Close HTTP::Client on IO::Error during request (#17318)
• Fix Content-Encoding: deflate (#17261)
• Fix HTTP::Request.from_io parsing empty header name (#17254)
• Fix HTTP::Request#form_params? to ignore invalid content-type (#17256)

Thanks @straight-shoota, @hahwul, @jgaskins, @Sija

Eventloop

All targets support a native event loop based directly on the system selector and use it by default.

We enabled epoll on Solaris (#17370) and kqueue on all remaining BSD targets (#17421, #17420). libevent is still available as a fallback, but now it’s strictly opt-in and becoming technically obsolete. We expect to deprecate in a following release.

Thanks, @ysbaddaden

KernelTLS

We finally enabled support for Kernel TLS in the OpenSSL bindings by default (#17059)

Thanks, @ysbaddaden

Misc

• File.exists? (#17307), as well as File::Info.readable?, .writable?, .executable? now receive a follow_symlinks: false argument(#17391)
• Add Char::Reader.new(Bytes) (#17428)
• Add Time::Span#to_nanoseconds etc. (#17190)
• Add GC.syscall(&) (#17150)
• Fixed backtraces when linking with -static-pie on musl-libc (#17316)

Thanks, @straight-shoota, @ysbaddaden

Deprecations

• Uppercase instance and class variables (#17160)
• HTTP::Request#local_address and #remote_address (#17260)
• LLVM::Type#size and #alignment (#17494)

Dependencies

• Support for LLVM 23.1 and 24.0 (#17432)
• Updated markd 0.6.0 (#17269)

Thanks, @straight-shoota, @hertzdevil

Packages

Updated distribution-scripts (#17178) brings upgrades of package dependencies, docker base images etc.

Thanks, @straight-shoota

This is the first release featuring builds for aarch64-windows-msvc.

Thanks, @hertzdevil

Maintainers

Crystal established a forward compatibility policy in RFC 30: Building Crystal 1.22 requires a stage-0 compiler at 1.14 or higher.

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Thanks

We have been able to do all of this thanks to the continued support of 84codes and all other sponsors. To maintain and increase the development pace, donations, and sponsorships are essential. OpenCollective is available for that.

Reach out to crystal@manas.tech if you’d like to become a direct sponsor or find other ways to support Crystal. We thank you in advance!

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