After five months of private development, the first public development release of the third generation of Logtalk is available from the GitHub Logtalk account. The release notes of the first alpha version detail the work done so far. It’s marked as an alpha release mainly because is not feature-complete; most libraries, examples, and bundled contributions work flawlessly. However, existing Logtalk 2 applications will likely require a few changes, essentially due to removed or renamed compiler options. Using Logtalk conditional compilation directives should easily allow you to keep compatibility with Logtalk 2 while, at the same time, allow testing with Logtalk 3.
There are major changes and features on Logtalk 3 and some of them will be discussed here in detail on forthcoming posts. The current plan is to release the first stable version of Logtalk 3 on February 9, 2013. This will mark the 14th anniversary of the first stable release of Logtalk 2.
I’m now working full time on Logtalk development and consulting. I’m resigning from the permanent position at my university. But I’m keeping my researcher position at CRACS – INESC TEC, Portugal. Logtalk was born from my research on programming languages and I expect some of the future enhancements to result from continuing research in collaboration with the logic programming community.
You’re invited to provide early feedback in Logtalk 3 development. As a programming language, Logtalk 3 is expected to keep a high-degree of backward compatibility with Logtalk 2. But the new features of Logtalk 3 will make it easier to develop large applications and will give you more mature development tools. The list of Logtalk 3 compatible back-end Prolog compilers is not yet final, however. In a major policy change from Logtalk 2, Logtalk 3 development will no longer be hold back by the slow progress of Prolog compilers towards official and de facto standards.