Lyric

A statically typed application language with a bytecode VM — standalone, and embeddable in a host with a capability-based sandbox.

What changed in v4.1.0 — 2026-08-27

Instant and Duration join the library's conformances. Additive: no existing program changes meaning, and nothing was deprecated or removed.

Instant and Duration conform to Equatable, Ordered, Hashable and Display. Every other value type in the library has carried these; the two time types never did, so comparing two instants meant unwrapping both to epochMillis(), sorting a List<Instant> was not possible at all, and neither type could be printed or used as a Map key.
```
if (started < finished) {              // Ordered
    println(finished.since(started));  // Display -> "3500ms"
}
sortList(stamps);                      // the reason Ordered is on the type
seen.set(finished, "done");            // Hashable
```
Instant.show() is the text iso() writes — the one textual form the type has. Duration.show() is the millisecond count with its unit (3500ms, -500ms), NOT a scaled 3.5s: the type counts whole milliseconds, and a rendering that divides them promises a precision the value does not carry.

compare is three comparisons rather than a subtraction of the two fields. Two instants far enough apart overflow that subtraction and it answers with the opposite sign.

+ and - did not arrive with them. plus, minus and since are methods, and an operator beside them would be a second way to write one calculation; Instant - Instant is a Duration besides, which the homogeneous operator interfaces do not express.