Towards Shake 1.0

Summary: I've just released a new version of Shake, with a --demo feature and an underlying continuation monad. I want to release v1.0 in the near future.

I've just released a new version of the Shake build system, version 0.13.3. While the version number is only 0.0.1 higher, the changelog lists a large number of improvements. In particular, two changes are:

• The Action monad is now based on continuations, which allows Shake to suspend threads without requiring a GHC RTS thread. The result is significantly less memory used on thread stacks. I still find it quite amazing that Haskell has such powerful and robust abstraction mechanisms that a huge change doesn't even break the API.
• The shake binary now features a --demo mode, invoked by running shake --demo. This mode generates a Shake project, compiles it, and shows off some of the features of Shake. You can the output of --demo here.

Version 1.0

With the two features above, I'm now looking towards Shake version 1.0. I'm not looking to make any significant backwards-incompatible change, or necessarily any code/API changes at all. However, if you have anything you think should be addressed before reaching such a milestone, please comment on the issue tracker or email the mailing list.

Shake website

The one thing I still want to finish before releasing version 1.0 is to have a proper website for Shake. I've registered shakebuild.com which will host the content, and have set up GitHub pages to serve it up. I have some rough content in the docs directory and a prototype generator in the website directory - as an example it currently generates something a bit like this for the user manual, but with a table of contents when run through the latest generator. I'd appreciate any help with the content, the generator, or the styling - just email the mailing list.