Kiesel Devlog #15: Release 0.4.0

In the latest devlog #15, the Kiesel project has reached release 0.4.0 after a 2.5 month development period. Over 64 commits were made to the project, many of which were focused on updating to Zig 0.17. While the core language implementation has been the main focus, recent additions such as file I/O and the ability to read arguments and environment variables have made a simple cat(1) clone possible.

The Kiesel project has implemented the Await Dictionary proposal, which is currently at Stage 3. This project has also seen ports of various open source works, such as SerenityOS, Zig, and Kiesel itself. These ports include updates to SerenityOS target support in Zig, LibC and Kernel changes, and the package being cross-compiled against a minimized Zig standard library.

Other notable updates include the revival of dos.zig, support for OpenBSD/NetBSD binaries in CI, and the implementation of inline caches in the bytecode interpreter. These optimizations provide speedups of 20-30% in microbenchmarks. The parser is also set to become faster, keeping an eye on future developments.