7.0 Alchemy

This longed-for day of the 7.0 engine, stable release is coming soon; some of my colleagues have already described before me the most appealing feature linked to this new version is the handling of Unicode characters. But that’s not all: allowing a flow so different from plain text to run through the engine resulted in touching so many parts of it that a deep refactoring has been executed.

In the 7.0 developers team, we’ve been fighting for almost a year the massive beast that renewing the whole engine was, and it’s now more than ever tamed and keen to act as expected.
All this process involved the use of artful alchemy; starting from a closed-mind golem, we had to move and refashion almost every single stone he was made of, and to rearrange all the cogs linking those moving parts to keep the communication between them going in the same way. This included giving a new shape to his brain; and he now has the ability to learn more easily a new knowledge or update independently what he already has, thus making the addition of a new feature a simpler way to go.

Now that the final shape of the new engine is finished, the only thing separating the community from the first stable release is the cogs correctness. All these parts relocations and updates let a little play come in few mechanisms interaction, and the huge amount of changes makes the tracking of those tiny errors way easier with your help: given the symptoms, it’s always possible for us to find the issue and bring the engine closer to the perfection aimed.

The best point in all of this is not that our creature can now handle Unicode: it’s more about all the advantages the community’s applications will be able to gain from it!