9. Release Notes

This following summarizes the most important changes in recent Spicy releases. For an exhaustive list of all changes, see the #CHANGES file coming with the distribution.

9.1. Version 1.11

New Functionality

GH-3779: Add %sync_advance hook.

This adds support for a new unit hook:
```
on %sync_advance(offset: uint64) {
    ...
}
```
This hook is called regularly during error recovery when synchronization skips over data or gaps while searching for a valid synchronization point. It can be used to check in on the synchronization to, e.g., abort further processing if it just keeps failing. offset is the current position inside the input stream that synchronization just skipped to.

By default, “called regularly” means that it’s called every 4KB of input skipped over while searching for a synchronization point. That value can be changed by setting a unit property %sync-advance-block-size = <number of bytes>.

As an additional minor tweak, this also changes the name of what used to be the __gap__ profiler to now be called __sync_advance because it’s profiling the time spent in skipping data, not just gaps.

Add unit method stream() to access current input stream, and stream method statistics() to retrieve input statistics.

This returns a struct of the following type, reflecting the input seen so far:

type StreamStatistics = struct {
    num_data_bytes: uint64;     ## number of data bytes processed
    num_data_chunks: uint64;    ## number of data chunks processed, excluding empty chunks
    num_gap_bytes: uint64;      ## number of gap bytes processed
    num_gap_chunks: uint64;     ## number of gap chunks processed, excluding empty chunks
};

GH-1750: Add to_real method to bytes.

This interprets the data as representing an ASCII-encoded floating point number and converts that into a real. The data can be in either decimal or hexadecimal format. If it cannot be parsed as either, throws an InvalidValue exception.
GH-1608: Add get_optional method to maps.

This returns an optional value either containing the map’s element for the given key if that entry exists, or an unset optional if it does not.
GH-90/GH-1733: Add result and spicy::Error types to Spicy to facilitate error handling.

Changed Functionality

The Spicy compiler has become a bit more strict and is now rejecting some ill-defined code constructs that previous versions ended up letting through. Specifically, the following cases will need updating in existing code:
- Identifiers from the (internal) hilti:: namespace are no longer accessible. Usually you can just scope them with spicy:: instead.
- Previous versions did not always enforce constness as it should have. In particular, function parameters could end up being mutable even when they weren’t declared as inout. Now inout is required for supporting any mutable operations on a parameter, so make sure to add it where needed.
- When using unit parameters, the type of any inout parameters now must be unit itself. To pass other types into a unit so that they can be modified by the unit, use reference instead of inout. For example, use type Foo = unit(s: sink&) instead of type Foo = unit(inout: sink). See https://docs.zeek.org/projects/spicy/en/latest/programming/parsing.html#unit-parameters for more.
The Spicy compiler new uses a more streamlined storage and access scheme to represent source code. This speeds up work up util C++ source translation (e.g., faster time to first error message during development).
spicyc options -c and -l no longer support compiling multiple Spicy source files to C++ code individually to then build them all together. This was a rarely used feature and actually already broken in some situations. Instead, use spicyc -x to produce the C++ code for all needed Spicy source files at once. -c and -l remain available for debugging purposes.
The spicyc option -P now requires a prefix argument that sets the C++ namespace, just like -x <prefix> does. This is so that the prototypes match the actual code generated by -x. To get the same identifiers as before, use an empty prefix (-P "").
GH-1763: Restrict initialization of const values to literals. This means that e.g., const values cannot be initialized from other const values or function calls anymore.
result and network are now keywords and cannot be used anymore as user-specified indentifiers.
GH-1661: Deprecate usage of &convert with &chunked.
GH-1657: Reduce data copying when passing data to the driver.
GH-1501: Improve some error messages for runtime parse errors.
GH-1655: Reject joint usage of filters and look-ahead.
GH-1675: Extend runtime profiling to measure parser input volume.
GH-1624: Enable optimizations when running spicy-build.

Bug fixes

GH-1759: Fix if-condition with switch parsing.
Fix Spicy’s support for network type.
GH-1598: Enforce that the argument new is either a type or a ctor.
GH-1742, GH-1760: Unroll constructors of big containers in generated code. We previously would generate code which would be expensive to compiler for some compilers. We now generate more friendly code.
GH-1745: Fix C++ initialization of global constants through global functions.
GH-1743: Use a checked cast for map’s in operator.
GH-1664: Fix &convert typing issue with bit ranges.
GH-1724: Fix skipping in size-constrained units. We previously could skip too much data if skip was used in a unit with a global &size.
Fix incremental skipping. We previously would incorrectly compute the amount of data to skip which could have potentially lead to the parser consuming more data than available.
GH-1586: Make skip productions behave like the production they are wrapping.
GH-1711: Fix forwarding of a reference unit parameter to a non-reference parameter.
GH-1599: Fix integer increment/decrement operators require mutable arguments.
GH-1493: Support/fix public type aliases to units.

Documentation

Add new section with guidelines and best practices. This focuses on performance for now, but may be extended with other areas alter. Much of the content was contributed by Corelight Labs.
Fix documented type mapping for integers.
Document generic operators.

9.2. Version 1.10

New Functionality

Changed Functionality

Numerous improvements to improve throughput of generated parsers.

For this release we have revisited the code typically generated for parsers and the runtime libraries they use with the goal of improving throughput of parsers at runtime. Coarsely summarized this work was centered around
- reduction of allocations during parsing
- reduction of data copies during parsing
- use of dedicated, hand-check implementations for automatically generated code to avoid overhead from safety checks in the runtime libraries
With these changes we see throughput improvements of some parsers in the range of 20-30%. This work consisted of numerous incremental changes, see CHANGES for the full list of changes.
GH-1667: Always advance input before attempting resynchronization.

When we enter resynchronization after hitting a parse error we previously would have left the input alone, even though we know it fails to parse. We then relied fully on resynchronization to advance the input.

With this patch we always forcibly advance the input to the next non-gap position. This has no effect for synchronization on literals, but allows it to happen earlier for regular expressions.
GH-1659: Lift requirement that bytes forwarded from filter be mutable.
GH-1489: Deprecate &bit-order on bit ranges.

This had no effect and allowing it may be confusing to users. Deprecate it with the idea of eventual removal.
Extend location printing to include single-line ranges.

For a location of, e.g., “line 1, column 5 to 10”, we now print 1:5-1:10, whereas we used to print it as only 1:5, hence dropping information.
GH-1500: Add += operator for string.

This allows appending to a string without having to allocate a new string. This might perform better most of the time.
GH-1640: Implement skipping for any field with known size.

This patch adds skip support for fields with &size attribute or of builtin type with known size. If a unit has a known size and it is specified in a &size attribute this also allows to skip over unit fields.

Bug fixes

GH-1605: Allow for unresolved types for set in operator.
GH-1617: Fix handling of %synchronize-* attributes for units in lists.

We previously would not detect %synchronize-at or %synchronize-from attributes if the unit was not directly in a field, i.e., we mishandled the common case of synchronizing on a unit in a list.

We now handle these attributes, regardless of how the unit appears.
GH-1585: Put closing of unit sinks behind feature guard.

This code gets emitted, regardless of whether a sink was actually connected or not. Put it behind a feature guard so it does not enable the feature on its own.
GH-1652: Fix filters consuming too much data.

We would previously assume that a filter would consume all available data. This only holds if the filter is attached to a top-level unit, but in general not if some sub-unit uses a filter. With this patch we explicitly compute how much data is consumed.
GH-1668: Fix incorrect data consumption for &max-size.

We would previously handle &size and &max-size almost identical with the only difference that &max-size sets up a slightly larger view to accommodate a sentinel. In particular, we also used identical code to set up the position where parsing should resume after such a field.

This was incorrect as it is in general impossible to tell where parsing continues after a field with &max-size since it does not signify a fixed view like &size. We now compute the next position for a &max-size field by inspecting the limited view to detect how much data was extracted.
GH-1522: Drop overzealous validator.

A validator was intended to reject a pattern of incorrect parsing of vectors, but instead ending up rejecting all vector parsing if the vector elements itself produced vectors. We dropped this validation.
GH-1632: Fix regex processing using {n,m} repeat syntax being off by one
GH-1648: Provide meaningful unit __begin value when parsing starts.

We previously would not provide __begin when starting the initial parse. This meant that e.g., offset() was not usable if nothing ever got parsed.

We now provide a meaningful value.
Fix skipping of literal fields with condition.
GH-1645: Fix &size check.

The current parsing offset could legitimately end up just beyond the &size amount.
GH-1634: Fix infinite loop in regular expression parsing.

Documentation

Update documentation of offset().
Fix docs namespace for symbols from filter module.

We previously would document these symbols to be in spicy even though they are in filter.
Add bitfield examples.

9.3. Version 1.9

New Functionality

GH-1468: Allow to directly access members of anonymous bitfields.

We now automatically map fields of anonymous bitfields into their containing unit.

type Foo = unit {
    : bitfield(8) {
        x: 0..3;
        y: 4..7;
    };

    on %done {
        print self.x, self.y;
    }
};

GH-1467: Support bitfield constants in Spicy for parsing.

One can now define bitfield “constants” for parsing by providing integer expressions with fields:
```
type Foo = unit {
  x: bitfield(8) {
    a: 0..3 = 2;
    b: 4..7;
    c: 7 = 1;
  };
```
This will first parse the bitfield as usual and then enforce that the two bit ranges that are coming with expressions (i.e., a and c) indeed containing the expected values. If they don’t, that’s a parse error.

We also support using such bitfield constants for look-ahead parsing:
```
type Foo = unit {
  x: uint8[];
  y: bitfield(8) {
    a: 0..3 = 4;
    b: 4..7;
  };
};
```
This will parse uint8s until a value is discovered that has its bits set as defined by the bitfield constant.

(We use the term “constant” loosely here: only the bits with values are actually enforced to be constant, all others are parsed as usual.)
GH-1089, GH-1421: Make offset() independent of random access functionality.

We now store the value returned by offset() directly in the unit instead of computing it on the fly when requested from cur - begin. With that offset() can be used without enabling random access functionality on the unit.
Add support for passing arbitrary C++ compiler flags.

This adds a magic environment variable HILTI_CXX_FLAGS which if set specifies compiler flags which should be passed during C++ compilation after implicit flags. This could be used to e.g., set defines, or set low-level compiler flags.

Even with this flag, for passing include directories one should still use HILTI_CXX_INCLUDE_DIRS since they are searched before any implicitly added paths.
GH-1435: Add bitwise operators &, |, and ^ for booleans.
GH-1465: Support skipping explicit %done in external hooks.

Assuming Foo::X is a unit type, these two are now equivalent:
```
on Foo::X::%done   { }
on Foo::X          { }
```

Changed Functionality

GH-1567: Speed up runtime calls to start profilers.
GH-1565: Disable capturing backtraces with HILTI exceptions in non-debug builds.
GH-1343: Include condition in &requires failure message.
GH-1466: Reject uses of self in unit &size and &max-size attribute.

Values in self are only available after parsing has started while &size and &max-size are consumed before that. This means that any use of self and its members in these contexts would only ever see unset members, so it should not be the intended use.
GH-1485: Add validator rejecting unsupported multiple uses of attributes.
GH-1465: Produce better error message when hooks are used on a unit field.
GH-1503: Handle anonymous bitfields inside switch statements.

We now map items of anonymous bitfields inside a switch cases into the unit namespace, just like we already do for top-level fields. We also catch if two anonymous bitfields inside those cases carry the same name, which would make accesses ambiguous.

So the following works now:
```
switch (self.n) {
    0 -> : bitfield(8) {
        A: 0..7;
    };
    * -> : bitfield(8) {
        B: 0..7;
    };
};
```
Whereas this does not work:
```
switch (self.n) {
    0 -> : bitfield(8) {
        A: 0..7;
    };
    * -> : bitfield(8) {
        A: 0..7;
    };
};
```
GH-1571: Remove trimming inside individual chunks.

Trimming a Chunk (always from the left) causes a lot of internal work with only limited benefit since we manage visibility with a stream::View on top of a Chunk anyway.

We now trimming only removes a Chunk from a Chain, but does not internally change individual the Chunk anymore. This should benefit performance but might lead to slightly increased memory use, but callers usually have that data in memory anyway.
Use find_package(Python) with version.

Zeek’s configure sets Python_EXECUTABLE has hint, but Spicy is using find_package(Python3) and would only use Python3_EXECUTABLE as hint. This results in Spicy finding a different (the default) Python executable when configuring Zeek with --with-python=/opt/custom/bin/python3.

Switch Spicy over to use find_package(Python) and add the minimum version so it knows to look for Python3.

Bug fixes

GH-1520: Fix handling of spicy-dump --enable-print.
Fix spicy-build to correctly infer library directory.
GH-1446: Initialize generated struct members in constructor body.
GH-1464: Add special handling for potential advance failure in trial mode.
GH-1275: Add missing lowering of Spicy unit ctor to HILTI struct ctor.
Fix rendering in validation of %byte-order attribute.
GH-1384: Fix stringification of DecodeErrorStrategy.
Fix handling of --show-backtraces flag.
GH-1032: Allow using using bitfields with type declarations.
GH-1484: Fix using of &convert on bitfields.
GH-1508: Fix returned value for <unit>.position().
GH-1504: Use user-inaccessible chars for encoding :: in feature variables.
GH-1550: Replace recursive deletion with explicit loop to avoid stack overflow.
GH-1549: Add feature guards to accesses of a unit’s __position.

Documentation

Move Zeek-specific documentation into Zeek documentation.
Clarify error handling docs.
Mention unit switch statements in conditional parsing docs.

9.4. Version 1.8

New Functionality

Add new skip keyword to let unit items efficiently skip over uninteresting data.

For cases where your parser just needs to skip over some data, without needing access to its content, Spicy provides a skip keyword to prefix corresponding fields with:
```
module Test;

public type Foo = unit {
    x: int8;
     : skip bytes &size=5;
    y: int8;
    on %done { print self; }
};
```
skip works for all kinds of fields but is particularly efficient with bytes fields, for which it will generate optimized code avoiding the overhead of storing any data.

skip fields may have conditions and hooks attached, like any other fields. However, they do not support $$ in expressions and hooks.

For readability, a skip field may be named (e.g., padding: skip bytes &size=3;), but even with a name, its value cannot be accessed.

skip fields extend support for void with attributes fields which are now deprecated.
Add runtime profiling infrastructure.

This add an option --enable-profiling to the HILTI and Spicy compilers. Use of the option does two things: (1) it sets a flag enabling inserting additional profiling instrumentation into generated C++ code, and (2) it enables using instrumentation for recording profiling information during execution of the compiled code, including dumping out a profiling report at the end. The profiling information collected includes time spent in HILTI functions as well as for parsing Spicy units and unit fields.

Changed Functionality

Optimizations for improved runtime performance.

This release contains a number of changes to improve the runtime performance of generated parsers. This includes tweaks for generating more performant code for parsers, low-level optimizations of types in to runtime support library as well as fine-tuning of parser execution at runtime.
Do not force locale on users of libhilti.
Avoid expensive checked iterator for internal Bytes iteration.
GH-1089: Allow to use offset() without enabling full random-access support.
GH-1394: Fix C++ normalization of generated enum values.
Disallow using $$ with anonymous containers.

Bug fixes

GH-1386: Prevent internal error when passed invalid context.
Fix potential use-after-move bug.
GH-1390: Initialize Bytes internal control block for all constructors.
GH-1396: Fix regex performance regression introduced by constant folding.
GH-1399: Guard access to unit _filters member with feature flag.
GH-1421: Store numerical offset in units instead of iterator for position.
GH-1436: Make sure Bytes::sub only throws HILTI exceptions.
GH-1447: Do not forcibly make strong_ref in function parameters immutable.
GH-1452: Allow resolving of unit parameters before self is fully resolved.
Make sure Spicy runtime config is initialized after spicy::rt::init.
Adjustments for building with GCC-13.

Documentation

Document how to check whether an optional value is set.
Preserve indention when extracting comments in doc generation.
Fix docs for long-form of -x flag to spicyc.

9.5. Version 1.7

New Functionality

Support Zeek-style documentation strings in Spicy source code.
Provide ability for host applications to initiate runtime’s module-pre-init phase manually.
Add DPD-style spicy::accept_input() and spicy::decline_input().
Add driver option to output full set of generated C++ files.
GH-1123: Support arbitrary expression as argument to type constructors, such as interval(...).

Changed Functionality

Search HILTI_CXX_INCLUDE_DIRS paths before default include paths.
Search user module paths before system paths.
Streamline runtime exception hierarchy.
Fix bug in cast from real to interval.
GH-1326: Generate proper runtime types for enums.
GH-1330: Reject uses of imported module IDs as expression.

Bug fixes

GH-1310: Fix ASAN false positive with GCC.
GH-1345: Improve runtime performance of stream iteration.
GH-1367: Use unique filename for all object files generated during JIT.
Remove potential race during JIT when using HILTI_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER.
GH-1349: Fix incremental regexp matching for potentially empty results.

Documentation

9.6. Version 1.6

New Functionality

GH-1249: Allow combining &eod with &until or &until-including.
GH-1251: When decoding bytes into a string using a given character set, allow caller to control error handling.

All methods taking a charset parameters now take an additional enum selecting 1 of 3 possible error handling strategies in case a character can’t be decoded/represented: STRICT throws an error, IGNORE skips the problematic character and proceeds with the next, and REPLACE replaces the problematic character with a safe substitute. REPLACE is the default everywhere now, so that by default no errors are triggered.

This comes with an additional functional change for the ASCII encoding: we now consistently sanitize characters that ASCII can’t represent when in REPLACE/IGNORE modes (and, hence, by default), and trigger errors in STRICT mode. Previously, we’d sometimes let them through, and never triggered any errors. This also fixes a bug with the ASCII encoding sometimes turning a non-printable character into multiple repeated substitutes.
GH-1294: Add library function to parse an address from string or bytes.
HLTO files now perform a version check when loaded.

We previously would potentially allow building a HLTO file against one version of the Spicy runtime, and then load it with a different version. If exposed symbols matched loading might have succeeded, but could still have lead to sublte bugs at runtime.

We now embed a runtime version string in HLTO files and reject loading HLTO files into a different runtime version. We require an exact version match.
New pack and unpack operators.

These provide low-level primitives for transforming a value into, or out of, a binary representations, see the docs for details.

Changed Functionality

GH-1236: Add support for adding link dependencies via --cxx-link.
GH-1285: C++ identifiers referenced in &cxxname are now automatically interpreted to be in the global namespace.
Synchronization-related debug messages are now logged to the spicy-verbose stream. We added logging of successful synchronization.
Downgrade required Flex version. We previously required at least flex-2.6.0; we can now build against flex-2.5.37.
Improve C++ caching during JIT.

We improved caching behavior via HILTI_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER if the configuration of spicyc was changed without changing the C++ file produced during JIT.
hilti::rt::isDebugVersion has been removed.
The -O | --optimize flag has been removed from command line tools.

This was already a no-op without observable side-effects.
GH-1311: Reject use of context() unit method if unit does not declare a context with %context.
GH-1319: Unsupported unit variable attributes are now rejected.
GH-1299: Add validator for bitfield field ranges.
We now reject uses of self as an ID.
GH-1233: Reject key types for maps that can’t be sorted.
Fix validator for field &default expression types for constness.

When checking types of field &default expressions we previously would also consider their constness. This breaks e.g., cases where the used expression is not a LHS like the field the &default is defined for,
```
type X = unit {
    var x: bytes = b"" + a;
};
```
We now do not consider constness in the type check anymore. Since fields are never const this allows us to set a &default with constant expressions as well.

Bug fixes

GH-1231: Add special handling for potential advance failure in trial mode.
GH-1115, GH-1196: Explicitly type temporary value used by &max_size logic.
GH-1143, GH-1220: Add coercion on assignment for optionals that only differ in constness of their inner types.
GH-1230: Add coercion to default argument of map::get.
GH-1234, GH-1238: Fix assertions with anonymous struct constructor.
GH-1248: Fix stop for unbounded loop.
GH-1250: Fix internal errors when seeing unsupported character classes in regular expression.
GH-1170: Fix contexts not allowing being passed inout.
GH-1266: Fix wrong type for Spicy-side self expression.
GH-1261: Fix inability to access unit fields through self in &convert expressions.
GH-1267: Install only needed headers from bundled SafeInt library.
GH-1227: Fix code generation when a module’s file could be imported through different means.
GH-1273: Remove bundled code licensed under CPOL license.
GH-1303: Fix potentially late synchronization when jumping over gaps during synchronization.
Do not force gold linker with user-provided linker flags or when built as a CMake subproject.
Improve efficiency of startsWith for long inputs.

Documentation

The documentation now reflects Zeek package manager Spicy feature templates.
The documentation for bitfields was clarified.
Documentation for casts from integers to boolean was added.
We added documentation for how to expose custom C++ code in Spicy.
Update doc link to commits mailing list.
Clarify that %context can only be used in top-level units.
Clarify that &until consumes the delimiter.
GH-1240: Clarify docs on SPICY_VERSION.
Add FAQ item on source locations.
Add example for use of ?..

9.7. Version 1.5

New Functionality

GH-1179: Cap parallelism use for JIT background jobs.

During JIT, we would previously launch all compilation jobs in parallel. For projects using many modules this could have lead to resource contention which often forced users to use sequential compilation with HILTI_JIT_SEQUENTIAL. We now by default cap the number of parallel background jobs at the number of logical cores. This can be parameterized with the environment variable HILTI_JIT_PARALLELISM which for HILTI_JIT_PARALLELISM=1 reproduces HILTI_JIT_SEQUENTIAL.
GH-1134: Add support for synchronize-at and synchronize-after properties.

These unit properties allow specifying a literal which should be searched for during error recovery. If the respective unit is used as a synchronize point during error recovery, i.e., it is used as a field which is marked &synchronize, input resynchronization during error recovery will seek to the next position of this pattern in the input stream.
GH-1209: Provide error message to %error handler.

We now allow to optionally provide a string parameter with %error that will receive the associated error message:
```
on %error(msg: string) { print msg; }
```

Changed Functionality

GH-1184: Allow more cache hits if only a few modules are changed in multi-module compilation.
GH-1208: Incremental performance tweaks for JIT.
GH-1197: Make handling of sanitizer workarounds more granular.

Bug fixes

GH-1150: Preserve additional permissions from umask when generating HLTO files.
GH-1154: Add stringificaton of Map::value_type.
GH-1080: Reject constant declarations at non-global scope.
GH-1164: Make compiler plugin initialization explicit.
GH-1050: Update location when entering most parser methods.
GH-1187: Fix support for having multiple source modules of the same name.
GH-1197: Prevent too early integer overflow in pow.
GH-1201: Adjust removal of symlinks on install for DESTDIR.
GH-1203: Allow changing DESTDIR between configure and install time.
GH-1204: Remove potential use-after-move.
GH-1210: Prevent unnecessarily executable stack with GNU toolchain.
GH-1206: Fix detection of recursive dependencies.
GH-1217: Produce hilti::rt::Bool when casting to boolean.
GH-1224: Fix import segfault.

Documentation

GH-44: Update docs for spicy-plugin rename _Zeek::Spicy -> Zeek::Spicy.
GH-1183: Update docs for Discourse migration.
GH-1205: Update Spicy docs for now being built into Zeek.

9.8. Version 1.4

New Functionality

Add support for recovery from parse errors or incomplete input

This release adds support for recovering from parse errors or incomplete input (e.g., gaps or partial connections). Grammars can denote unit synchronization points with a &synchronize attribute. If an error is encountered while extracting a previous fields, parsing will attempt to resynchronize the input at that point. The synchronization result needs to be checked and confirmed or rejected explicitly; a number of hooks are provided for that. See the docs for details.
Remove restriction that units used as sinks need to be public
Uses ccache for C++ compilation during JIT if Spicy itself was configured to use ccache

Spicy spends a considerable amount of JIT time compiling generated C++ code. This work can be cached if neither inputs nor any of the used flags have changed so that subsequent JIT runs can complete much faster.

We now automatically cache many C++ compilation artifacts with ccache if Spicy itself was configured with e.g., --with-hilti-compiler-launcher=ccache. This behavior can be controlled or disabled via the HILTI_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER environment variable.

GH-842: Add Spicy support for struct initialization.
GH-1036: Support unit initialization through a struct constructor expression.

Changed Functionality

GH-1074: %random-access is now derived automatically from uses and declaring it explicitly has been deprecated.
GH-1072: Disallow enum declarations with non-unique values.

It is unclear what code should be generated when requested to convert an integer value to the following enum:
```
type E = enum {
    A = 1,
    B = 2,
    C = 1,
};
```
For 1 we could produce either E::A or E::C here.

Instead of allowing this ambiguity we now disallow enums with non-unique values.

Bug fixes

Prevent exception if cache directory is not readable.
Propagate failure from cmake up to ./configure.
GH-1030: Make sure types required for globals are declared before being used.
Fix potentially use-after-free in stringification of stream::View.
GH-1087: Make offset return correct value even before parsing of field.

Documentation

9.9. Version 1.3

New Functionality

Add optimizer removing unused %random-access or %filter functionality

If a unit has e.g., a %random-access attribute Spicy emits additional code to track and update offsets. If the %random-access functionality is not used this leads to unneeded code being emitted which causes unneeded overhead, both during JIT and during execution.

We now emit such feature-dependent code under a feature flag (effectively a global boolean constant) which is by default on. Additionally, we added an optimizer pass which detects whether a feature is used and can disable unused feature functionality (switching the feature flag to off), and can then remove unreachable code behind such disabled feature flags by performing basic constant folding.
Add optimizer pass removing unused sink functionality

By default any unit declared public can be used as a sink. To support sink behavior additional code is emitted and invoked at runtime, regardless of whether the unit is used as a sink or not.

We now detect unused sink functionality and avoid emitting it.
GH-934: Allow $$ in place of self in unit convert attributes.

Changed Functionality

GH-941: Allow use of units with all defaulted parameters as entry points.
We added precompilation support for libspicy.h.
Drop support for end-of-life Fedora 32, and add support for Fedora 34.

Bug fixes

Correctly handle lookups for NULL library symbols.
Use safe integers for size functions in the runtime library.
Make it possible to build on ARM64.
Fix building with gcc-11.

Documentation

9.10. Version 1.2

New Functionality

GH-913: Add support for switch-level &parse-at and &parse-from attributes inside a unit.
Add optimizer pass removing unimplemented functions and methods.

This introduces a global pass triggered after all individual input ASTs have been finalized, but before we generate any C++ code. We then strip out any unimplemented member functions (typically Spicy hooks), both their definitions as well as their uses.

In order to correctly handle previously generated C++ files which might have been generated with different optimization settings, we disallow optimizations if we detect that a C++ input file was generated by us.

Changed Functionality

Add validation of unit switch attributes. We previously silently ignored unsupported attributes; now errors are raised.
Remove configure option --build-zeek-plugin. Spicy no longer supports building the Zeek plugin/analyzers in-tree. This used to be available primarily for development purposes, but became challenging to maintain.
Add environment variable HILTI_CXX_INCLUDE_DIRS to specify additional C++ include directories when compiling generated code.
GH-940: Add runtime check for parsing progress during loops.

Bug fixes

Fix computation of unset locations.
Fix accidental truncating conversion in integer code.

Documentation

9.11. Version 1.1

New Functionality

GH-844: Add support for &size attribute to unit switch statement.
GH-26: Add %skip, %skip-pre and %skip-post properties for skipping input matching a regular expression before any further input processing takes place.
Extend library functionality provided by the spicy module:
- crc32_init()/crc32_add() compute CRC32 checksums.
- mktime() creates a time value from individual components.
- zlib_init() initializes a ZlibStream with a given window bits argument.
- Zlib now accepts a window bits parameter.
Add a new find() method to units for that searches for a bytes sequence inside their input data, forward or backward from a given starting position.
Add support for &chunked when parsing bytes data with &until or &until_including.
Add encode() method to string for conversion to bytes.
Extend parsing of void fields:
- Add support for &eod to skip all data until the end of the current input is encountered.
- Add support for &until to skip all data until a deliminator is encountered. The deliminator will be extracted from the stream before continuing.
Port Spicy to Apple silicon.
Add Dockerfile for OpenSUSE 15.2.

Changed Functionality

Reject void fields with names.
Lower minimum required Python version to 3.2.
GH-882: Lower minimum required Bison version to 3.0.

Bug fixes

GH-872: Fix missing normalization of enum label IDs.
GH-878: Fix casting integers to enums.
GH-889: Fix hook handling for anonymous void fields.
GH-901: Fix type resolution bug in &convert.
Fix handling of &size attribute for anonymous void fields.
Fix missing update to input position before running %done hook.
Add validation rejecting $$ in hooks not supporting it.
Make sure container sizes are runtime integers.
Fix missing operator<< for enums when generating debug code.
GH-917: Default-initialize forwarding fields without type arguments.
GH-1774: Fix synchronization with symbol different from last lookahead token.
GH-1777: Fix interning of regexps for %skip*.

Documentation

GH-37: Add documentation on how to skip data with void fields.

9.12. Migrating from the old prototype

Below we summarize language changes in Spicy compared to the original research prototype. Note that some of the prototype’s more advanced functionality has not yet been ported to the new code base; see the corresponding list on GitHub for what’s still missing.

Changes:

Renamed export linkage to public.
Renamed %byteorder property to %byte-order.
Renamed &byteorder attribute to &byte-order.
Renamed &bitorder attribute to &bit-order.
All unit-level properties now need to conclude with a semicolon (e.g., %filter;).
Renamed &length attribute to &size.
Renamed &until_including attribute to &until-including.
Replaced &parse with separate &parse-from (taking a “bytes” instance) and &parse-at (taking a stream iterator) attributes.
Attributes no longer accept their arguments in parentheses, it now must <attr>=expr. (Before, both versions were accepted.)
uint<N> and int<N> are no longer accepted, use uintN/intN instead (which worked before already as well)
list<T> is no longer supported, use vector<T> instead.
New syntax for parsing sequences: Use x: int8[5] instead of x: vector<int8> &length=5. For lists of unknown size, use x: int8[]. When parsing sequences sub-units, use: x: Item[]; or, if further arguments/attributes are required, x: (Item(1,2,3))[]. (The latter syntax isn’t great, but the old syntax was ambiguous.)
New syntax for functions: function f(<params>) [: <result>] instead of <result> f(<params>)
Renamed runtime support module from Spicy to spicy (so use import spicy)
In units, variables are now initialized to default values by default. Previously, that was (inconsistently) happening only for variables of type sink. To revert to the old behaviour, add “&optional” to the variable.
Renamed type double to real.
Generally, types don’t coerce implicitly to bool anymore except in specific language contexts, such as in statements with boolean conditions.
Filters can now be implemented in Spicy itself. The pre-built filter::Base64Decode and filter::Zlib provide the base64 and zlib functionality of the previously built-in filters.
{unit,sink}::add_filter are renamed to {unit,sink}::connect_filter.
Enums don’t coerce to bool anymore, need to manually compare to Undef.
Coercion to bool now happens only in certain contexts, like if-conditions (similar to C++).
The sink method sequence has been renamed to sequence_number.
The effect of the sink method set_initial_sequence_number no longer persists when reconnecting a different unit to a sink.
&transient is no longer a supported unit field attribute. The same effect can now be achieved through an anonymous field (also see next point).
$$ can now be generally used in hooks to refer to the just parsed value. That’s particularly useful inside hooks for anonymous fields, including fields that previously were &transient (see above). Previously, “$$” worked only for container elements in foreach hooks (which still operates the same way).
Fields of type real are parsed with &type attribute (e.g., &type=Spicy::RealType::IEEE754_Double). They used to &precision attributes with a different enum type.
Assigning to unit fields and variables no longer triggers any hooks. That also means that hooks are generally no longer supported for variables (This is tricky to implement, not clear it’s worth the effort.)
When importing modules, module names are now case-sensitive.
When parsing vectors/lists of integers of a given length, use &count instead of &length.
Zeek plugin:
- Bro::dpd_confirm() has been renamed to zeek::confirm_protocol(). There’s also a corresponding zeek::reject_protocol().
- To auto-export enums to Zeek, they need to be declared public.