GF 3.7 Release Notes
June 2015

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==Installation==

See the [download page http://www.grammaticalframework.org/download/index.html].

==What's new==

Over 800 changes have been pushed to the source repository since
[the release of GF 3.6 release-3.6.html] in June 2014.

===GF compiler and run-time library===

====New features and notable changes====

- GF shell: the commands available in the shell after importing with the
  ``-retain`` flag are now a superset of the commands available after
  importing without ``-retain``.
  (Previously commands that require compilation all the way to PMCFG were
  not available when the ``-retain`` flag was used.)
- The command line flag ``-s``/``-q`` now silences all warnings.
- GF now supports parallel batch compilation of grammars.
  This is activated with the ``-j``
  flag. (For the time being, you also need to pass ``+RTS -N -RTS`` to enable
  parallelism in the GHC run-time system.)
- Concrete syntax can now be translated to Haskell. The flag
  ``-output-format=haskell`` translates abstract syntax to Haskell as before.
   By also adding ``-haskell=concrete`` you get a Haskell module for each
   concrete syntax of the grammar. These contain translations of
   linearization types and linearization functions.
   By adding ``-haskell=variants`` you get linearization functions that output
   all variants.
  (You don't get any functions for parsing.)
- Now there is full support for all orthographic primitives:
  ``BIND``, ``SOFT_BIND``, ``SOFT_SPACE``, ``CAPIT``, ``ALL_CAPIT`` and
   ``nonExist``.
- It is now possible to define callbacks for literals from the Haskell
  binding to the C runtime. This is used for instance in 
  the Wide Coverage translator on the Web.


====Other changes and bug fixes====

- GF now uses colors to highlight errors and warnings (except on Windows).
- Even though GF works with absolute paths internally, GF now shows paths
  relative to the current directory in diagnostic output.
- GF Shell and ``gf -server``: improved responsiveness when large grammars are
  loaded (by increasing the GHC RTS idle timeout before full GC from the
  default 0.3s to 5s).
- Numerous fixes in the translation dictionaries.
- C-run-time system: Bug fixes in the Java and Python bindings.
- C-run-time system: the parser is now fully Unicode compatible.
- Because of the new orthographic primitives, the version numbers in
  ``.pgf`` and ``.gfo`` files have been bumped. PGF files
  produced with this version of GF can not be used with older versions of GF.
  If you get an error message saying ``.gfo file version mismatch``, remove
  old ``.gfo`` files.


====Changes of interest to compiler developers====

- The compiler is now available as a Haskell library. The module ``GF``
  serves as a preliminary compiler API. It exports a selection of
  types and functions from the compiler.
- Some Haddock documentation improvements to document the compiler API.
- Various refactoring for readability, modularity and efficiency. Removal of
  some dead code.


===Resource Grammar Library===

- New languages in the Resource Grammar Library: Mongolian
  (see the [updated synopsis ../lib/doc/synopsis.html]).


===GF Cloud services===

- Minibar and Wide Coverage Translation Demo: speech output is now available
  (in browsers that support it).
- The Wide Coverage Translation Demo can now draw syntax trees and show
  inflection tables. There are also lots of improvements in the
  translation grammar and dictionaries.
- PGF service: add commands ``c-abstrtree`` and ``c-parsetree``.
  These are the C runtime variants of the ``absttree`` and ``parsetree``
  commands. They work in the same way, but support fewer rendering options.
- PGF service:
  The ``parse``/``translate``/``c-parse``/``c-translate`` commands now
  recognize the option ``jsontree=true`` to augment the returned JSON
  structure with a field called
  ``jsontree`` next to the field ``tree``, or ``jsontrees`` next to ``trees``,
  containing the the returned syntax tree in JSON format.
- PGF service: when using ``full=yes`` with the ``complete`` command,
  additional information about completions is included in the output, in
  particular there is an additional field ``seq`` containing the longest
  possible completion.
- PGF service: add command ``c-linearizeAll`` to obtain all variants.
- PGF service: PGFs now expire from the internal cache when they have been
  unused for 24 hours, to keep memory use down in long running servers.
- PGF service: limit the number of parallel calls to the C run-time parse
  function to 4 by default. The limit can be changed with the ``-j`` flag.


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