Hi all,

At the context meeting we presented (and discussed) the state of luatex and

released 1.08 as a prelude to 1.09. Today we announce version 1.09.

We are gradually entering into a "bug fix / no more features"

mode. The goal is to have the beginning of "stable" luatex 1.10 for

next texlive 2019, and in our minds "stable" means "in the long term

like pdftex".

In practice this means that luatex comes with lua 5.3.4, that

luajittex uses luajit 2.1 beta3, and that context will assume and support

this setup for a long time. This also means that we will keep the lua

5.3.4 API. Issues with luajitex will be solved whenever it is

possible, but we expect that some platforms will not have luajittex

and  this is nothing new, as it already happens in texlive.

By going stable we also hope that those using the lua interfaces will

not be catched by surprises. The internals are predictable enough for

that.

We have a new pdf parser (pplib from Paweł Jackowski) that replaces

poppler.  It is much smaller, a bit faster and it's written in pure C

so it fits also well with our idea of "stable" wrt to the compiler

versions. It also removes a dependency on a large library set. We are

actively testing it but appreciate testing from "power users" (like

Hraban did at the ctx meeting). Of course our powerful buildbot farm

helps a lot in the process.

We will of course try to make the luatex manual better and further

document mkiv features. If you have suggestions for context, don't

hesitate to ask because we keep evolving.

We would like to stress the terms "gradually" and "beginning":

practically we think means that, at least for the next year, there

will be our "usual" cycle of intermediate bugfix releases, but at this

point we are quite sure that for the TeX users the core features are

both powerful and complete enough for a large set of useful

applications, and context is an example of such application.

At the same time, we are not stopping research and developing, if only

because the rest of the world is moving on. As usual the context

meeting is place where we will report the results.

Happy using,

Luigi & Hans