Devlog: Cleaning Up v1.3 For Release

After many hours of work, bool and `string finally became real, and it was time to cleanup the mess I left behind from the version’s development.

Mainly the only thing worked on was some cleanup:

• roadmap now reflects actual v1.3 features and implementations
• updated README and contribution documents to match the current compiler pipeline
• cleaned up string examples so they have the full intended v1.3 style instead of some leftover testing usage
• pushed the compiler’s version to 1.3.0
• updated help / usage text so it matches the new output-path and auto-run behavior

Prior to this, if I had just merged and shipped, the release wouldv’e been messy: README, Contributing, example files, and guidance commands were all mixing older details which made it confusing — even for me — when trying to explore the language and what it has to offer.

For a bootstrapped compiler especially, making sure everything is cleaned up and polished is something that should not be ignored. I’m definitely guilty of overlooking this, but I’ve outlayed a whole plan for v1.3 unlike past versions, and part of it was setting up a proper versioning system and polishing its release as it goes. This format will be adopted in future versions, since it’s just way cleaner and nicer to look at.

Future work

At this point, v1.3 is done and has implemented, at minimum, a concrete foundation for post-v2 bools and strings. Next will likely be more subtle improvements, and features that are currently reliant explicitly on C rather than Flower-hosted code. In order for v2.0, Flower will have to be effectively independent from C if it wants to emit machine code. Currently I am planning on adding features such as Type Aliases and maybe a stdlib prior to that, but anything can change!!

Thanks for being here for all of v1.3 <3