Gawk 5.4.0 is released, with replaced MinRX matcher

3 days ago

Gawk 5.4.0 has been released, marking a major update.
The release introduces the MinRX regular expression matcher as the default engine, replacing the older GNU matchers, with full POSIX compliance.
Significant improvements include enhanced Unicode/UTF-8 support for MinGW and Cygwin ports, and updates for OpenVMS compatibility across Alpha, Itanium, and x86_64 architectures.
New features include the @nsinclude directive for namespace management, hexadecimal floating-point support, and rationalized --traditional option behavior.
Persistent memory usage has been updated with additional meta-information storage and version matching checks.
The release drops support for outdated translations and includes a new Arabic translation, while some .gmo files are no longer built due to lack of updates.
Performance improvements include faster reading of regular disk input files and the option to compile with -O3 optimization (though not default due to potential bugs).
UDP support in networking is marked obsolete and will be removed in version 6.0.
The manual's bug reporting guidelines have been updated to explicitly discourage ad hominem attacks and discussion of proprietary software.
A known issue with case-insensitive matching in certain locales is acknowledged, with a fix expected in the first patch.

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