enso/CHANGELOG-2021.md

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.18 (2021-10-12)

Enso Compiler

• [Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.30][engine-0.2.31]. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Visual Environment

• Fixed freezing after inactivity. When the IDE window was minimized or covered by other windows or invisible for any other reason for a duration around one minute or longer then it would often be frozen for some seconds on return. Now it is possible to interact with the IDE instantly, no matter how long it had been inactive.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.17 (2021-09-23)

Visual Environment

• Correct handling of command-line flags. Command line arguments of the form --backend=false or --backend false are now handled as expected and turn off the "backend" option. The same fix has been applied to all other boolean command-line options as well.
• Visualizations will be attached after project is ready. This addresses a rare issue when initially opened visualizations were automatically closed rather than filled with data.

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.30. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.16 (2021-09-16)

Visual Environment

• Auto-layout for new nodes. When a node is selected and a new node gets created below using Tab then the new node is automatically positioned far enough to the right to find sufficient space and avoid overlapping with existing nodes.

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.29. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Visual Environment

• Sharp rendering on screens with fractional pixel ratios.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.15 (2021-09-09)

Visual Environment

• Fixed parsing of the --no-data-gathering command line option. Flag's name has been changed to --data-gathering, so now --data-gathering=false and --data-gathering=true are supported as well.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.14 (2021-09-02)

Visual Environment

• Visualization previews are disabled. Previously, hovering over a node's output port for more than four seconds would temporarily reveal the node's visualization. This behavior is disabled now.

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.28. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.13 (2021-08-27)

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.27. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.12 (2021-08-13)

Visual Environment

• Improvements to visualization handling. These improvements are fixing possible performance issues around attaching and detaching visualizations.
• GeoMap visualization will ignore points with null coordinates. Now the presence of such points in the dataset will not break initial map positioning.

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.26. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.11 (2021-08-09)

This update contains major performance improvements and exposes new privacy user settings. We will work towards stabilizing it in the next weeks in order to make these updates be shipped in a stable release before the end of the year.

Visual Environment

• New look of open project dialog. Now it has a "Open project" title at the top.
• Documentation coments are displayed next to the nodes..

Enso Compiler

• [Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.22][1762]. If you are interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find out more details in the engine release notes.

Visual Environment

• Fixed a bug where edited node expression was sometimes altered. When editing node expression, the changes were occasionally reverted, or the grayed-out parameter names were added to the actual expression.
  

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.10 (2021-07-23)

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.15. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find out more details in the engine release notes.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.9 (2021-07-16)

Visual Environment

• Improved undo-redo. Node selection, enabling/disabling visualisations and entering a node are now affected by undo/redo and are restored on project startup.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.8 (2021-06-09)

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.12. If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find out more details in the engine release notes.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.7 (2021-06-06)

Visual Environment

• User Authentication. Users can sign in to Enso using Google, GitHub or email accounts.

Visual Environment

• Fix node selection bug . Fix nodes not being deselected correctly in some circumstances. This would lead to nodes moving too fast when dragged [1650] or the internal state of the project being inconsistent [1626].

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.6 (2021-06-28)

Visual Environment

• [Profling mode.][1546] The IDE contains a profiling mode now which can be entered through a button in the top-right corner or through the keybinding ctrl+p. This mode does not display any information yet. In the future, it will display the running times of nodes and maybe more useful statistics.
• Area selection. You can now select multiple nodes at once. Just click and drag on the background of your graph and see the beauty of the area selection appear.
• Opening projects in application graphical interface. Press cmd+o to bring the list of projects. Select a project on the list to open it.
• Initial support for undo-redo. Press cmd+z to undo last action and cmd+z to redo last undone action. This version of undo redo does not have proper support for text editor and undoing UI changes (like selecting nodes).

EnsoGL (rendering engine)

Visual Environment

• Nodes in graph no longer overlap panels. The Searcher, project name, breadcrumbs and status bar are displayed "above" nodes.

Enso Compiler

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.5 (2021-05-14)

Visual Environment

• Create New Project action in Searcher. When you bring the searcher with tab having no node selected, a new action will be available next to the examples and code suggestions: Create New Project. When you choose it by clicking with mouse or selecting and pressing enter, a new unnamed project will be created and opened in the application. Then you can give a name to this project.
• Signed builds. Our builds are signed and will avoid warnings from the operating system about being untrusted.

EnsoGL (rendering engine)

• Components for picking numbers and ranges.. We now have some internal re-usable UI components for selecting numbers or a range. Stay tuned for them appearing in the IDE.

Visual Environment

• Delete key will delete selected nodes. Only the non-intuitive backspace key was assigned to this action before.
• It is possible to move around after deleting a node with a selected visualization. Deleting a node while its attached visualization was selected made it impossible to pan or zoom around the stage afterwards. This error is fixed now.
• Fixed an internal error that would make the IDE fail on some browser.. Instead of crashing on browser that don't support the feature we use, we are now just start a little bit slower.

Enso Compiler

• Updated Enso engine to version 0.2.11.

If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.4 (2021-05-04)

Visual Environment

• Window management buttons.. The IDE now has components for "fullscreen" and "close" buttons. They will when running IDE in a cloud environment where no native window buttons are available.
• Customizable backend options. When invoking Enso IDE through command line interface, it is possible to add the -- argument separator. All arguments following the separator will be passed to the backend.
• Added --verbose parameter. If --verbose is given as command line argument, the IDE and the backend will produce more detailed logs.

Visual Environment

• Some command line arguments were not applied correctly in the IDE. Some arguments were not passed correctly to the IDE leading to erroneous behavior or appearance of the electron app. This is now fixed.

Enso Compiler

If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.3 (2020-04-13)

Visual Environment

• The status bar reports connectivity issues. The IDE maintains a connection to the Enso Language Server. If this connection is lost, any unsaved and further work will be lost. In this build we have added a notification in the status bar to signal that the connection has been lost and that the IDE must be restarted. In future, the IDE will try to automatically reconnect.
• Visualizations can now be maximised to fill the screen by selecting the node and pressing space twice. To quit this view, press space again.
• Visualizations are previewed when you hover over an output port. There is now a quick preview for visualizations and error descriptions. Hovering over a node output will first show a tooltip with the type information and then, after some time, will show the visualization of the node. This preview visualization will be located above other nodes, whereas the normal view, will be shown below nodes. Errors will show the preview visualization immediately. Nodes without type information will also show the visualization immediately. You can enter a quick preview mode by pressing ctrl (or command on macOS), which will show the preview visualization immediately when hovering above a node's output port.
• Database Visualizations. Visualizations for the Database library have been added. The Table visualization now automatically executes the underlying query to display its results as a table. In addition, the SQL Query visualization allows the user to see the query that is going to be run against the database.
• Histogram and Scatter Plot now support Dataframes. The Table and Column datatypes are properly visualized. Scatter Plot can display points of different colors, shapes and sizes, all as defined by the data within the Table.
• Many small visual improvements. See the source issue for more details.
• The dark theme is officially supported now. You can start the IDE with the --theme=dark option to enable it.
• You can hide the node labels with the --no-node-labels option. This is useful when creating demo videos.
• Added a Heatmap visualization. Just as for the Scatter Plot, it supports visualizing Table, but also Vector.
• Add a background to the status bar.
• Display breadcrumbs behind nodes and other objects.
• Image visualization.. Visualizations for the Enso Image library. Now you can display the Image type and a string with an image encoded in base64. The histogram visualization has been adjusted, allowing you to display the values of the precomputed bins, which is useful when the dataset is relatively big, and it's cheaper to send the precomputed bins rather than the entire dataset.
• [Output type labels.][1427] The labels, that show the output type of a node on hover, appear now in a fixed position right below the node, instead of a pop-up, as they did before.

Visual Environment

• Not adding spurious imports. Fixed cases where the IDE was adding unnecessary library imports when selecting hints from the node searcher. This makes the generated textual code much easier to read, and reduces the likelihood of accidental name collisions.
• Hovering over an output port shows a pop-up with the result type of a node. This allows easy discovery of the result type of a node, which can help with both debugging and development.
• Visualizations can define the context for preprocessor evaluation. Users can now decide which module's context should be used for visualization preprocessor. This allows providing visualizations with standard library functionalities or defining utilities that are shared between multiple visualizations.
• Fixed an issue with multiple instances of the IDE running. This fixes an issue where multiple instances of the IDE (or even other applications) could lead to the IDE not working.
• Allow JS to log arbitrary objects. Previously using console.log in a visualisation or during development would crash the IDE. Now it correctly logs the string representation of the object. This is great for debugging custom visualizations.
• Fix the mouse cursor offset on systems with fractional display scaling. The cursor now works with any display scaling, instead of there being an offset between the visible cursor and the cursor selection.
• Disable area selection. The area selection was visible despite being non-functional. To avoid confusion, area selection has been disabled until it is correctly implemented.
• Fix an error after adding a node. Sometimes, after picking a suggestion, the inserted node was spuriously annotated with "The name could not be found" error.
• Handle syntax errors in custom-defined visualizations. The IDE is now able to run properly, even if some of the custom visualizations inside a project contain syntax errors.
• Fix issues with pasting multi-line text into single-line text fields. The line in the copied text will be inserted and all additional lines will be ignored.
• Users can opt out of anonymous data gathering. This can be done with the --no-data-gathering command-line flag when starting the IDE.
• Provide a theming API for JavaScript visualizations. It is now possible to use the Enso theming engine while developing custom visualizations in JavaScript. You can query it for all IDE colors, including the colors used to represent types.
• You can now start the IDE service without a window again. The command line argument --no-window now starts all the required backend services again, and prints the port on the command line. This allows you to open the IDE in a web browser of your choice.
• JS visualizations have gestures consistent with the IDE. Panning and zooming now works just as expected using both a trackpad and mouse.
• Running watch command works on first try.. Running the build command run watch would fail if it was run as the first command on a clean repository. This now works.
• The inputType field of visualizations is actually taken into consideration. The visualization chooser shows only the entries that work properly for the node's output type.
• Fix applying the output of the selected node to the expression of a new node. For example, having selected a node with Table output and adding a new node with expression at "x" == "y", the selected node was applied to the right side of ==: at "x" == operator1."y" instead of operator1.at "x" == "y".
• Enso_Project.data is visible in the searcher.
• The Geo Map visualization recognizes columns regardless of the case of their name. This allows visualizing tables with columns like LONGITUDE or Longitude, where previously only longitude was recognized.
• It is possible now to switch themes. Additionally, the theme manager was integrated with the FRP event engine, which has been a long-standing issue in the IDE. Themes management was exposed to JavaScript with the window.theme variable. It is even possible to change and develop themes live by editing theme variables directly in the Chrome Inspector. Use the following command to give this a go: theme.snapshot("t1"); theme.get("t1").interactiveMode().
• The active visualization is highlighted. Now it is clearly visible when the mouse events are passed to the visualization.
• Fixed an issue where projects containing certain language constructs failed to load.
• Fixed a case where IDE could lose connection to the backend after some time.
• Improved the performance of the graph editor, particularly when opening a project for the first time.

EnsoGL (rendering engine)

• Unified shadow generation. Added a toolset to create shadows for arbitrary UI components.

Enso Compiler

If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.2 (2020-03-04)

This is a release focused on bug-fixing, stability, and performance. It improves the performance of workflows and visualizations, and improves the look and feel of the graphical interface. In addition, the graphical interface now informs the users about errors and where they originate.

• Learn how to define custom data visualizations in Enso.
• Learn how to use Java libraries in Enso, to build a webserver.
• Learn how to use Javascript libraries in Enso, to build custom server-side website rendering.
• Discover why Enso Compiler is so fast and how it was built to support a dual-representation language.
• Learn more about the vision behind Enso and about its planned future.

Visual Environment

• Errors in workflows are now displayed in the graphical interface. Previously, these errors were silently skipped, which was non-intuitive and hard to understand. Now, the IDE displays both dataflow errors and panics in a nice and descriptive fashion.
• Added geographic map support for Tables (data frames). Tables that have latitude, longitude, and optionally label columns can now be shown as points on a map.
• Added a shortcut for live reloading of visualization files. This drastically improves how quickly new visualizations can be tested during their development. This is currently limited in that, after reloading visualization definitions, the currently visible visualizations must be switched to another and switched back to refresh their content. See the video podcast about building custom visualizations to learn more.
• Added a visual indicator of the ongoing standard library compilation. Currently, each time IDE is started, the backend needs to compile the standard library before it can provide IDE with type information and values. Because of that, not all functionalities are ready to work directly after starting the IDE. Now, there is a visible indication of the ongoing background process.
• Added the ability to reposition visualisations. There is now an icon in the visualization action bar that allows dragging the visualization away from a node. Once the visualization has been moved, another icon appears that can pin the visualization back to the node.
• There is now an API to show Version Control System (like Git) status for nodes.

Visual Environment

• You can now use the table visualization to display data frames. Please note, that large tables will get truncated to 2000 entries. This limitation will be lifted in future releases.
• Performance improvements during visual workflow. Nodes added with the searcher will have their values automatically assigned to newly generated variables, which allows the Enso Engine to cache intermediate values and hence improve visualization performance.
• Minor documentation rendering fixes. Fixed cases where text would be misinterpreted as a tag, added support for new tag types, added support for more common characters, properly renders overflowing text.
• Improved handling of projects created with other IDE versions. The IDE is now better at dealing with incompatible metadata in files, which stores node visual position information, the history of chosen searcher suggestions, etc. This will allow IDE to correctly open projects that were created using a different IDE version and prevent unnecessary loss of metadata.
• Pressing and holding up and down arrow keys make the list view selection move continuously.
• The shortcuts to close the application and to toggle the developer tools at runtime now work on all supported platforms.
• The loading progress indicator remains visible while IDE initializes. Previously the loading progress indicator completed too quickly and stopped spinning before the IDE was ready. Now it stays active, giving a visual indication that the initialization is still in progress.
• Fixed visual glitch where a node's text was displayed as white on a white background. Most notably this occurred with the output node of a function generated using the node collapse refactoring.
• Many visual glitches were fixed, including small "pixel-like" artifacts appearing on the screen.
• Several parser improvements. The parser used in the IDE has been updated to the latest version. This resolves several issues with language constructs like import, lambdas, and parentheses, whereupon typing certain text the edit could be automatically reverted.
• The auto-import functionality was improved. Libraries' Main modules are omitted in expressions inserted by the searcher. For example, the point method of Geo library will be displayed as Geo.point and will insert import Geo instead of Geo.Main.
• Cursors in text editors behave correctly now (they are not affected by scene pan and zoom). This was possible because of the new multi-camera management system implemented in EnsoGL.
• Fixed method names highlighted in pink. There was a bug introduced after one of the latest Engine updates, that sent Unresolved_symbol types, which made all methods pink. This is fixed now.

EnsoGL (rendering engine)

• A new multi-camera management system, allowing the same shape systems to be rendered on different layers from different cameras. The implementation automatically caches the same shape system definitions per scene layer in order to minimize the amount of WebGL draw calls and hence improve performance.
• A new depth-ordering mechanism for symbols and shapes. It is now possible to define depth order dependencies between symbols, shapes, and shape systems.
• Various performance improvements, especially for the text rendering engine.
• Display objects handle visibility correctly now. Display objects are not visible by default and need to be attached to a visible parent to be shown on the screen.

Enso Compiler

If you're interested in the enhancements and fixes made to the Enso compiler, you can find their release notes here.

Enso 2.0.0-alpha.1 (2020-01-26)

This is the first release of Enso, a general-purpose programming language and environment for interactive data processing. It is a tool that spans the entire stack, going from high-level visualization and communication to the nitty-gritty of backend services, all in a single language.

Anonymous Data Collection

Please note that this release collects anonymous usage data which will be used to improve Enso and prepare it for a stable release. We will switch to opt-in data collection in stable version releases. The usage data will not contain your code (expressions above nodes), however, reported errors may contain brief snippets of out of context code that specifically leads to the error, like "the method 'foo' does not exist on Number". The following data will be collected:

• Session length.
• Graph editing events (node create, dele, position change, connect, disconnect, collapse, edit start, edit end). This will not include any information about node expressions used.
• Navigation events (camera movement, scope change).
• Visualization events (visualization open, close, switch). This will not include any information about the displayed data nor the rendered visualization itself.
• Project management events (project open, close, rename).
• Errors (IDE crashes, WASM panics, Project Manager errors, Language Server errors, Compiler errors).
• Performance statistics (minimum, maximum, average GUI refresh rate).