GF 3.7 Release Notes

June 2015

Installation

Over 800 changes have been pushed to the source repository since the release of GF 3.6 in June 2014.

GF shell: the commands available in the shell after importing with the -retain flag are now a superset of the commands available after importing without -retain. (Previously commands that require compilation all the way to PMCFG were not available when the -retain flag was used.)
The command line flag -s/-q now silences all warnings.
GF now supports parallel batch compilation of grammars. This is activated with the -j flag. (For the time being, you also need to pass +RTS -N -RTS to enable parallelism in the GHC run-time system.)
Concrete syntax can now be translated to Haskell. The flag -output-format=haskell translates abstract syntax to Haskell as before. By also adding -haskell=concrete you get a Haskell module for each concrete syntax of the grammar. These contain translations of linearization types and linearization functions. By adding -haskell=variants you get linearization functions that output all variants. (You don't get any functions for parsing.)
Now there is full support for all orthographic primitives: BIND, SOFT_BIND, SOFT_SPACE, CAPIT, ALL_CAPIT and nonExist.
It is now possible to define callbacks for literals from the Haskell binding to the C runtime. This is used for instance in the Wide Coverage translator on the Web.

GF now uses colors to highlight errors and warnings (except on Windows).
Even though GF works with absolute paths internally, GF now shows paths relative to the current directory in diagnostic output.
GF Shell and gf -server: improved responsiveness when large grammars are loaded (by increasing the GHC RTS idle timeout before full GC from the default 0.3s to 5s).
Numerous fixes in the translation dictionaries.
C-run-time system: Bug fixes in the Java and Python bindings.
C-run-time system: the parser is now fully Unicode compatible.
Because of the new orthographic primitives, the version numbers in .pgf and .gfo files have been bumped. PGF files produced with this version of GF can not be used with older versions of GF. If you get an error message saying .gfo file version mismatch, remove old .gfo files.

The compiler is now available as a Haskell library. The module GF serves as a preliminary compiler API. It exports a selection of types and functions from the compiler.
Some Haddock documentation improvements to document the compiler API.
Various refactoring for readability, modularity and efficiency. Removal of some dead code.

New languages in the Resource Grammar Library: Mongolian (see the updated synopsis).

Minibar and Wide Coverage Translation Demo: speech output is now available (in browsers that support it).
The Wide Coverage Translation Demo can now draw syntax trees and show inflection tables. There are also lots of improvements in the translation grammar and dictionaries.
PGF service: add commands c-abstrtree and c-parsetree. These are the C runtime variants of the absttree and parsetree commands. They work in the same way, but support fewer rendering options.
PGF service: The parse/translate/c-parse/c-translate commands now recognize the option jsontree=true to augment the returned JSON structure with a field called jsontree next to the field tree, or jsontrees next to trees, containing the the returned syntax tree in JSON format.
PGF service: when using full=yes with the complete command, additional information about completions is included in the output, in particular there is an additional field seq containing the longest possible completion.
PGF service: add command c-linearizeAll to obtain all variants.
PGF service: PGFs now expire from the internal cache when they have been unused for 24 hours, to keep memory use down in long running servers.
PGF service: limit the number of parallel calls to the C run-time parse function to 4 by default. The limit can be changed with the -j flag.