2025-12-25 03:25:54

Released KC3 v0.1.16 🎄

KC3 is a programming language project developed by kmx.io. Taking its roots in C, Elixir and Common Lisp, it could be described as C with Elixir modules, pattern matching, and a semantic object system backed by a graph database. The idea is to plug modules, closures, pattern matching, a graph database and metaprogramming into C11 with a small set of dependencies.

See the release on

• Github
• git.kmx.io

See the KC3 guides for information about installation.

New in this release

• libkc3

  • dlopen inside lib/ only
  • Generic typed pointers : (U8*) 0x0
  • make kc3_require and env_eval_do_block more careful about error handling
  • MP-safe integer counters : defcounter name = value
    • environment hash table for name resolution
    • mp-safe
    • Counter.decrease(Ident, Tag) as a cfn_macro, Tag must be a positive integer (non-zero)
    • Counter.get(Ident) as a cfn_macro
    • Counter.increase(Ident, Tag) as a cfn_macro, Tag must be a positive integer (non-zero)
    • Counter module included at init
  • unveil supported on OpenBSD
  • pledge supported on OpenBSD
  • rename f128 to f80: long double is actually 80 bits precision on x86 and amd64
  • followed System-V ABI documentation for struct alignment and padding, works on amd64, arm64, i386 and sparc64 (marshalling and unmarshalling is portable across all these architectures)

• libtls

  • basic TLS client and server in test/tls/tls.kc3

• ikc3

  • Remote procedure call
    • client : ikc3 --client HOST PORT
      • opens a prompt on stdin and forwards parsed tags to server using RPC.request("input")
      • reads structured response from server :

        %RPC.Response{out: "plop\n",
                      err: "warning: message\n",
                      result: (Sw) 5}
        

    • server : ikc3 --server HOST PORT
      • accepts only one connection and exits
      • works with netcat (no prompt)
    • TLS with libtls : ikc3 --tls (--client|--server) HOST PORT
      • "ikc3: TLS server: listening on HOST PORT"
      • "ikc3: TLS server: client connected: HOST PORT TLS-1.3"
      • "ikc3: TLS client: connected to HOST PORT TLS-1.3"
  • ship ikc3 as a standalone file that links to the right lib directory on MacOS, this way you can open ikc3 using Finder in a Terminal.app and the dynamic libraries will still be found (require Socket loads the socket library for instance, through dlopen)

• build system

  • use runj to parallelize configure and update_sources
  • use sort to have a portable sort algorithm that gives consistent results across all operating systems.

• test infrastructure

  • modular test infrastructure with test/test.subr and test/test_runner
  • use runj to call test_runner in parallel
  • removed sleep 2 that slowed each ikc3 test
  • all test suites run in under 30 seconds now compared to more than 5 minutes before

• HTTPd

  • limit acceptor loop using defcounter
  • achieved securelevel(2) after load_app() by moving all def* into proper modules and using defcounter
  • apply unveil filesystem access permissions on OpenBSD
    • current dir (./) is read-only and ./log and ./db are read-write
    • using kc3 unveil wrapper that soft fails on other systems
    • on OpenBSD a failed unveil call aborts the program into the debugger
  • apply unrevokable restrictions on future syscalls on OpenBSD using pledge(2)

• window

  • demo
    • unified all OpenGL demos under window/demo
  • SDL2
    • OpenGLESv3
      • Use Angle GLESv3 implementation with Metal backend on MacOS. This provides SDL2 with an EGL/GLESv3 driver on MacOS despite OpenGL support being dropped by Apple.
  • EGL backend
    • XCB backend for X11
    • VT backend on Linux and OpenBSD using DRM KMS and GBM

• kc3s supports the following command line arguments :

  • RPC

    • --server 127.0.0.1 1026
    • --client 127.0.0.1 1026

  • TLS

    • --tls
    • --tls --server 127.0.0.1 1026
    • --tls --client 127.0.0.1 1026

  • additionnaly code was deduplicated from ikc3 and kc3s to share the same source file for both binaries

• kpkg - KC3 package manager

  • written in 3 days in KC3 + C
  • Argument parsing as a while loop with with pattern matching (like Elixir)
  • Added repo definitions for :
    • freetype
    • kc3
    • libbsd
    • libevent
    • libffi
    • libmd
    • libpng
    • libressl
  • supports cross compilation
  • used as main platform for compiling kc3 and dependencies for Android

• release engineering

  • compressed dmg with large icons and a nice arrow pointing to applications symlink
    • mac release binaries work from any absolute path and use relative paths to find dynamic libraries
  • debian package building from sources
  • gentoo overlay and ebuilds for
    • kc3
    • kmx_sort
    • runj

• removed unused/merged branches