Lyric

What changed in v1.12.0 — 2026-08-19

The standard library grows up. Every public item is documented, constructors live on the types, the first real deprecations start their clock, and the library tests itself — in Lyric. Two compiler fixes came out of the work. The bytecode format stays 3.2.

Added

• Constructors on the types: List<T>.empty(), Map<K, V>.empty(), Set<T>.empty(), StringBuilder.new() and Random.seeded(seed). The free functions emptyList, emptyMap, emptySet and newRandom still work and warn as deprecated — the first real uses of @Deprecated, and their removal lands with the next major. (newStringBuilder points at its successor in the documentation; its attribute waits on std.core visibility inside std.string, where the import would be a cycle.)

• std.io.file.readBytes: the whole content as raw bytes, undecoded — the answer readText cannot give, because its UTF-8 decoding turns invalid bytes into U+FFFD. Writing bytes is not there yet: an array has never crossed the native boundary as a parameter, and that machinery is a change of its own.

• The standard library tests itself. stdlib-tests/ holds behavioral tests written in Lyric and run by lyric test; the build runs them, and both repository invariants — formatted, and compiling in silence — cover the directory.

• Every public item of the standard library is documented — hover and the reference site answer everywhere — and a test pins completeness, not a count: new API without documentation is a red build.

• A bare import that shadows a builtin type warns (LYR-SEM0077): import std.string; binds the name string, and the annotation then names the module. The warning says the way out; using the shadowed name as a type is now a proper error naming the trap — previously it CRASHED the compiler on the local-annotation path.

Changed

• @Deprecated may sit on generic declarations — the one exception to the no-attributes-on-generics rule, because its consumer is the compiler and no metadata row is involved; none is emitted there.

• A static call on a generic instance substitutes the caller's type parameter: List<T>.empty() inside your own generic function works now; previously the lowering met the bare T and failed with an internal error.

• Two parameters of std.string.replace/replaceFirst are named replacement (signature help used to show a German name); every remaining German local and section header in the library is English now.

The full changelog →