v0.5.0-rc1

Don't forget to check out our docs for more details on the updated functionality!

Please welcome two new contributors, @Rangi42 and @dannye! Rangi did more than half of the work on this release—our biggest one yet!

Deprecated:

• _PI wasn't useful, so it's deprecated now
• PRINTT, PRINTV, PRINTF and PRINTI are obsoleted by the new PRINT/PRINTLN and STRFMT

Known issues:

• An ELIF condition right after a taken IF/ELIF block is still evaluated (#764)
• Regression: Expanding recurse EQUS "recurse" hangs rgbasm (#696)

Added:

• New MACRO <name> syntax for defining macros! The old syntax will still be supported for a couple versions, but will eventually be phased out.
• RGBFIX can now be used in pipelines! Example: rgblink -o - obj/header.o obj/game.o | rgbfix -v -p0xFF >bin/dinos_with_lasers.gb
• {symbol} interpolation outside of strings, similar to macro args (differs from the pre-0.4.2 behavior!!)
• More complex format specifiers are now allowed in symbol interpolations
• Anonymous labels
• Environment var SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH can be used for reproducible builds
• Underscores can be used in numeric literals (e.g. %1101_1110_1010_1101)
• New string functions STRRIN, STRRPL and STRFMT
• \# to get all of a macro's arguments
• """Multi-line string literals"""
• FOR blocks!
• BREAK exits REPT and FOR early
• POW and LOG fixed-point functions
• ** exponent operator (for integers)
• REDEF to redefine EQUS much more conveniently
• RL has been reintroduced alongside RB and RW
• LOAD UNION and LOAD FRAGMENT

Changed:

• Syntax errors will now be more verbose! Be careful that YMMV depending on the Bison version that RGBASM was compiled with.
• Syntax errors are no longer fatal! If a line contains a syntax error, RGBASM will discard it and attempt to continue with the next line.
• RGBFIX's -m now accepts MBC names
• More symbols will be available in the .sym and .map files
• Slack totals are now included in the .map files
• Interaction of quotes and macro args should be more intuitive
• ds can now repeat patterns, not just a single byte
• Global labels can now be indented, not just local ones
• Trailing commas are allowed for most "list" directives, such as db
• STRCAT can now concat any amount of strings
• LOAD blocks cannot create ROM sections anymore (#576)
• ROUND, FLOOR and CEIL fixed-point builtins were present but undocumented
• Macro arguments can now be shifted by a negative amount, "un-shifting" them
• Macro args can now be empty, though this causes a warning

Removed:

• GLOBAL and XDEF keywords (deprecated aliases of EXPORT)
• Colon-less global labels
• *-comments
• rgbasm -vno longer prints the elapsed time (use time for that)

Fixed:

• Enabled several optimizations that should improve performance, especially RGBASM
• SECTION FRAGMENTs now respect their constraints at their respective beginnings, not as a whole
• Line numbers could be incorrect on Windows
• RGBASM will explicitly reject more than one input file, rather than silently ignore them
• Macro args weren't ignored in block comments
• Fixed a rare crash with unterminated REPT/FOR blocks
• Fixed incorrect handling of text after MACRO, ENDM and ENDR tokens
• Can't start a new section if another with the same name has been PUSHS'd
• ds N, @ could produce incorrect results
• ELIF and ELSE were allowed after ELSE
• . was treated as a label
• Performance of gbdiff.bash improved significantly
• Defining an EQUS after referencing it is now an error
• Passing -t and -O to RGBLINK generated an output too large

Attention downstream packagers

The yacc dependency has been changed to GNU Bison! Our Makefile relies on bison -V to conditionally enable some features (src/check_bison_ver.sh) and our CMakeLists on the Bison CMake package, so both should be compatible with many versions, at least 3.0 (3.0.4 successfully tested). Please report breakage in our issue tracker.