GF 3.5 Release Notes

August 2013

Installation

Over 400 changes have been pushed to the source repository since the release of GF 3.4.

The Haskell source code for GF now compiles with GHC 7.6 and hence the the latest Haskell Platform (2013.2.0.0). Compatibility with GHC 7.4 is also maintained.
gf -s/-q now silences no linearization of ... warnings.
Faster regular expression pattern matching in the grammar compiler.
Two bugs in the partial evaluator that caused problems with pattern macros and variants have been fixed.
A portability problem with PGF files has been fixed. It could cause problems when PGF files were produced on a 32-bit system and used on a 64-bit system.

The new runtime in C (in /src/runtime/c/) is now stable enough to be used although there are still features from the Haskell runtime which are not ported yet. The new runtime provides the following new features:
- state of the art statistical parser for GF (PMCFG)
- the parser is usable in a robust mode, i.e. even if the sentence is not in the scope of the grammar it is still possible to get a list of parsable chunks
- the linearizer is also more robust than the one in Haskell since it can linearize the partial trees returned from the robust parser
- the exhaustive generation for GF abstract trees generates the trees in decreasing probability order (the order in Haskell is unspecified).
- we have started using just-in-time compilation to native code in the exhaustive generator. The goal is to reach the state where GF will provide state of the art theorem prover.
There is a binding from Python to the C runtime in /src/runtime/python/.
A volunteer to complete the binding from Java is highly wanted, /src/runtime/java/.

New languages in the Resource Grammar Library: Greek, Maltese (see the updated synopsis).
Various improvements for several other languages.
Updated web-based RGL browser (/lib/doc/browse/), with search-by-type and inbuilt syntax tree builder.

Word alignment diagrams can now be restricted to a subset of the languages supported by the grammar.
Minibar: you can now click on a linearization to obtain a table with all variants and forms.
Support for cross-site HTTP requests.
A UTF-8 decoding problem in gf -server has been fixed. It was caused by a backward incompatible change in network-2.4.1.1.
Various other small improvements and bug fixes.