These implementations of the bc and dc programs offer a number of advantages compared to the current implementations in the FreeBSD base system: - They do not depend on external large number functions (i.e. no dependency on OpenSSL or any other large number library) - They implements all features found in GNU bc/dc (with the exception of the forking of sub-processes, which the author of this version considers as a security issue). - They are significantly faster than the current code in base (more than 2 orders of magnitude in some of my tests, e.g. for 12345^100000). - They should be fully compatible with all features and the behavior of the current implementations in FreeBSD (not formally verified). - They support POSIX message catalogs and come with localized messages in Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Portugueze, and Russian. - They offer very detailed man-pages that provide far more information than the current ones. The upstream sources contain a large number of tests, which are not imported with this commit. They could be integrated into our test framework at a latter time. Installation of this version is controlled by the option "MK_GH_BC=yes". This option will be set to yes by default in 13-CURRENT, but will be off by default in 12-STABLE. Approved by: imp Obtained from: https://git.yzena.com/gavin/bc MFC after: 4 weeks Relnotes: yes Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D19982
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3.0.2
This is a production release that adds utf8
locale symlinks and removes an
unused auto
variable from the ceil()
function in the extended math
library.
Users do NOT need to update unless they want the locales.
3.0.1
This is a production release with two small changes. Users do NOT need to
upgrade to this release; however, if they haven't upgraded to 3.0.0
yet, it
may be worthwhile to upgrade to this release.
The first change is fixing a compiler warning on FreeBSD with strict warnings on.
The second change is to make the new implementation of ceil()
in lib2.bc
much more efficient.
3.0.0
Notes for package maintainers:
First, the 2.7.0
release series saw a change in the option parsing. This made
me change one error message and add a few others. The error message that was
changed removed one format specifier. This means that printf()
will seqfault
on old locale files. Unfortunately, bc
cannot use any locale files except the
global ones that are already installed, so it will use the previous ones while
running tests during install. If bc
segfaults while running arg tests when
updating, it is because the global locale files have not been replaced. Make
sure to either prevent the test suite from running on update or remove the old
locale files before updating. Once this is done, bc
should install without
problems.
Second, the option to build without signal support has been removed. See below for the reasons why.
This is a production release with some small bug fixes, a few improvements,
three major bug fixes, and a complete redesign of bc
's error and signal
handling. Users and package maintainers should update to this version as soon
as possible.
The first major bug fix was in how bc
executed files. Previously, a whole file
was parsed before it was executed, but if a function is defined after code,
especially if the function definition was actually a redefinition, and the code
before the definition referred to the previous function, this bc
would replace
the function before executing any code. The fix was to make sure that all code
that existed before a function definition was executed.
The second major bug fix was in bc
's lib2.bc
. The ceil()
function had a
bug where a 0
in the decimal place after the truncation position, caused it to
output the wrong numbers if there was any non-zero digit after.
The third major bug is that when passing parameters to functions, if an expression included an array (not an array element) as a parameter, it was accepted, when it should have been rejected. It is now correctly rejected.
Beyond that, this bc
got several improvements that both sped it up, improved
the handling of signals, and improved the error handling.
First, the requirements for bc
were pushed back to POSIX 2008. bc
uses one
function, strdup()
, which is not in POSIX 2001, and it is in the X/Open System
Interfaces group 2001. It is, however, in POSIX 2008, and since POSIX 2008 is
old enough to be supported anywhere that I care, that should be the requirement.
Second, the BcVm global variable was put into bss
. This actually slightly
reduces the size of the executable from a massive code shrink, and it will stop
bc
from allocating a large set of memory when bc
starts.
Third, the default Karatsuba length was updated from 64 to 32 after making the optimization changes below, since 32 is going to be better than 64 after the changes.
Fourth, Spanish translations were added.
Fifth, the interpreter received a speedup to make performance on non-math-heavy
scripts more competitive with GNU bc
. While improvements did, in fact, get it
much closer (see the benchmarks), it isn't quite there.
There were several things done to speed up the interpreter:
First, several small inefficiencies were removed. These inefficiencies included
calling the function bc_vec_pop(v)
twice instead of calling
bc_vec_npop(v, 2)
. They also included an extra function call for checking the
size of the stack and checking the size of the stack more than once on several
operations.
Second, since the current bc
function is the one that stores constants and
strings, the program caches pointers to the current function's vectors of
constants and strings to prevent needing to grab the current function in order
to grab a constant or a string.
Third, bc
tries to reuse BcNum
's (the internal representation of
arbitary-precision numbers). If a BcNum
has the default capacity of
BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
(32 on 64-bit and 16 on 32-bit) when it is freed, it is added
to a list of available BcNum
's. And then, when a BcNum
is allocated with a
capacity of BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
and any BcNum
's exist on the list of reusable
ones, one of those ones is grabbed instead.
In order to support these changes, the BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
was changed. It used to
be 16 bytes on all systems, but it was changed to more closely align with the
minimum allocation size on Linux, which is either 32 bytes (64-bit musl), 24
bytes (64-bit glibc), 16 bytes (32-bit musl), or 12 bytes (32-bit glibc). Since
these are the minimum allocation sizes, these are the sizes that would be
allocated anyway, making it worth it to just use the whole space, so the value
of BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
on 64-bit systems was changed to 32 bytes.
On top of that, at least on 64-bit, BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
supports numbers with
either 72 integer digits or 45 integer digits and 27 fractional digits. This
should be more than enough for most cases since bc
's default scale
values
are 0 or 20, meaning that, by default, it has at most 20 fractional digits. And
45 integer digits are a lot; it's enough to calculate the amount of mass in
the Milky Way galaxy in kilograms. Also, 72 digits is enough to calculate the
diameter of the universe in Planck lengths.
(For 32-bit, these numbers are either 32 integer digits or 12 integer digits and
20 fractional digits. These are also quite big, and going much bigger on a
32-bit system seems a little pointless since 12 digits in just under a trillion
and 20 fractional digits is still enough for about any use since 10^-20
light
years is just under a millimeter.)
All of this together means that for ordinary uses, and even uses in scientific work, the default number size will be all that is needed, which means that nearly all, if not all, numbers will be reused, relieving pressure on the system allocator.
I did several experiments to find the changes that had the most impact,
especially with regard to reusing BcNum
's. One was putting BcNum
's into
buckets according to their capacity in powers of 2 up to 512. That performed
worse than bc
did in 2.7.2
. Another was putting any BcNum
on the reuse
list that had a capacity of BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE * 2
and reusing them for BcNum
's
that requested BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
. This did reduce the amount of time spent, but
it also spent a lot of time in the system allocator for an unknown reason. (When
using strace
, a bunch more brk
calls showed up.) Just reusing BcNum
's that
had exactly BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
capacity spent the smallest amount of time in both
user and system time. This makes sense, especially with the changes to make
BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
bigger on 64-bit systems, since the vast majority of numbers
will only ever use numbers with a size less than or equal to BC_NUM_DEF_SIZE
.
Last of all, bc
's signal handling underwent a complete redesign. (This is the
reason that this version is 3.0.0
and not 2.8.0
.) The change was to move
from a polling approach to signal handling to an interrupt-based approach.
Previously, every single loop condition had a check for signals. I suspect that this could be expensive when in tight loops.
Now, the signal handler just uses longjmp()
(actually siglongjmp()
) to start
an unwinding of the stack until it is stopped or the stack is unwound to
main()
, which just returns. If bc
is currently executing code that cannot be
safely interrupted (according to POSIX), then signals are "locked." The signal
handler checks if the lock is taken, and if it is, it just sets the status to
indicate that a signal arrived. Later, when the signal lock is released, the
status is checked to see if a signal came in. If so, the stack unwinding starts.
This design eliminates polling in favor of maintaining a stack of jmp_buf
's.
This has its own performance implications, but it gives better interaction. And
the cost of pushing and popping a jmp_buf
in a function is paid at most twice.
Most functions do not pay that price, and most of the rest only pay it once.
(There are only some 3 functions in bc
that push and pop a jmp_buf
twice.)
As a side effect of this change, I had to eliminate the use of stdio.h
in bc
because stdio
does not play nice with signals and longjmp()
. I implemented
custom I/O buffer code that takes a fraction of the size. This means that static
builds will be smaller, but non-static builds will be bigger, though they will
have less linking time.
This change is also good because my history implementation was already bypassing
stdio
for good reasons, and unifying the architecture was a win.
Another reason for this change is that my bc
should always behave correctly
in the presence of signals like SIGINT
, SIGTERM
, and SIGQUIT
. With the
addition of my own I/O buffering, I needed to also make sure that the buffers
were correctly flushed even when such signals happened.
For this reason, I removed the option to build without signal support.
As a nice side effect of this change, the error handling code could be changed to take advantage of the stack unwinding that signals used. This means that signals and error handling use the same code paths, which means that the stack unwinding is well-tested. (Errors are tested heavily in the test suite.)
It also means that functions do not need to return a status code that
every caller needs to check. This eliminated over 100 branches that simply
checked return codes and then passed that return code up the stack if necessary.
The code bloat savings from this is at least 1700 bytes on x86_64
, before
taking into account the extra code from removing stdio.h
.
2.7.2
This is a production release with one major bug fix.
The length()
built-in function can take either a number or an array. If it
takes an array, it returns the length of the array. Arrays can be passed by
reference. The bug is that the length()
function would not properly
dereference arrays that were references. This is a bug that affects all users.
ALL USERS SHOULD UPDATE bc
.
2.7.1
This is a production release with fixes for new locales and fixes for compiler warnings on FreeBSD.
2.7.0
This is a production release with a bug fix for Linux, new translations, and new features.
Bug fixes:
- Option parsing in
BC_ENV_ARGS
was broken on Linux in 2.6.1 becauseglibc
'sgetopt_long()
is broken. To get around that, and to support long options on every platform, an adapted version ofoptparse
was added. Now,bc
does not even usegetopt()
. - Parsing
BC_ENV_ARGS
with quotes now works. It isn't the smartest, but it does the job if there are spaces in file names.
The following new languages are supported:
- Dutch
- Polish
- Russian
- Japanes
- Simplified Chinese
All of these translations were generated using DeepL, so improvements are welcome.
There is only one new feature: bc
now has a built-in pseudo-random number
generator (PRNG).
The PRNG is seeded, making it useful for applications where
/dev/urandom
does not work because output needs to be reproducible. However,
it also uses /dev/urandom
to seed itself by default, so it will start with a
good seed by default.
It also outputs 32 bits on 32-bit platforms and 64 bits on 64-bit platforms, far
better than the 15 bits of C's rand()
and bash
's $RANDOM
.
In addition, the PRNG can take a bound, and when it gets a bound, it
automatically adjusts to remove bias. It can also generate numbers of arbitrary
size. (As of the time of release, the largest pseudo-random number generated by
this bc
was generated with a bound of 2^(2^20)
.)
IMPORTANT: read the bc
manual and the dc
manual to find out
exactly what guarantees the PRNG provides. The underlying implementation is not
guaranteed to stay the same, but the guarantees that it provides are guaranteed
to stay the same regardless of the implementation.
On top of that, four functions were added to bc
's extended math library
to make using the PRNG easier:
frand(p)
: Generates a number between[0,1)
top
decimal places.ifrand(i, p)
: Generates an integer with boundi
and adds it tofrand(p)
.srand(x)
: Randomizes the sign ofx
. In other words, it flips the sign ofx
with probability0.5
.brand()
: Returns a random boolean value (either0
or1
).
2.6.1
This is a production release with a bug fix for FreeBSD.
The bug was that when bc
was built without long options, it would give a fatal
error on every run. This was caused by a mishandling of optind
.
2.6.0
This release is a production release with no bugfixes. If you do not want to upgrade, you don't have to.
No source code changed; the only thing that changed was lib2.bc
.
This release adds one function to the extended math library: p(x, y)
,
which calculates x
to the power of y
, whether or not y
is an integer. (The
^
operator can only accept integer powers.)
This release also includes a couple of small tweaks to the extended math
library, mostly to fix returning numbers with too high of scale
.
2.5.3
This release is a production release which addresses inconsistencies in the
Portuguese locales. No bc
code was changed.
The issues were that the ISO files used different naming, and also that the files that should have been symlinks were not. I did not catch that because GitHub rendered them the exact same way.
2.5.2
This release is a production release.
No code was changed, but the build system was changed to allow CFLAGS
to be
given to CC
, like this:
CC="gcc -O3 -march=native" ./configure.sh
If this happens, the flags are automatically put into CFLAGS
, and the compiler
is set appropriately. In the example above this means that CC
will be "gcc"
and CFLAGS
will be "-O3 -march=native".
This behavior was added to conform to GNU autotools practices.
2.5.1
This is a production release which addresses portability concerns discovered
in the bc
build system. No bc
code was changed.
- Support for Solaris SPARC and AIX were added.
- Minor documentations edits were performed.
- An option for
configure.sh
was added to disable long options ifgetopt_long()
is missing.
2.5.0
This is a production release with new translations. No code changed.
The translations were contributed by bugcrazy, and they are for Portuguese, both Portugal and Brazil locales.
2.4.0
This is a production release primarily aimed at improving dc
.
- A couple of copy and paste errors in the
dc
manual were fixed. dc
startup was optimized by making sure it didn't have to set upbc
-only things.- The
bc
&&
and||
operators were made available todc
through theM
andm
commands, respectively. dc
macros were changed to be tail call-optimized.
The last item, tail call optimization, means that if the last thing in a macro
is a call to another macro, then the old macro is popped before executing the
new macro. This change was made to stop dc
from consuming more and more memory
as macros are executed in a loop.
The q
and Q
commands still respect the "hidden" macros by way of recording
how many macros were removed by tail call optimization.
2.3.2
This is a production release meant to fix warnings in the Gentoo ebuild
by
making it possible to disable binary stripping. Other users do not need to
upgrade.
2.3.1
This is a production release. It fixes a bug that caused -1000000000 < -1
to
return 0
. This only happened with negative numbers and only if the value on
the left was more negative by a certain amount. That said, this bug is a bad
bug, and needs to be fixed.
ALL USERS SHOULD UPDATE bc
.
2.3.0
This is a production release with changes to the build system.
2.2.0
This release is a production release. It only has new features and performance improvements.
- The performance of
sqrt(x)
was improved. - The new function
root(x, n)
was added to the extended math library to calculaten
th roots. - The new function
cbrt(x)
was added to the extended math library to calculate cube roots.
2.1.3
This is a non-critical release; it just changes the build system, and in non-breaking ways:
- Linked locale files were changed to link to their sources with a relative link.
- A bug in
configure.sh
that caused long option parsing to fail underbash
was fixed.
2.1.2
This release is not a critical release.
- A few codes were added to history.
- Multiplication was optimized a bit more.
- Addition and subtraction were both optimized a bit more.
2.1.1
This release contains a fix for the test suite made for Linux from Scratch: now
the test suite prints pass
when a test is passed.
Other than that, there is no change in this release, so distros and other users do not need to upgrade.
2.1.0
This release is a production release.
The following bugs were fixed:
- A
dc
bug that caused stack mishandling was fixed. - A warning on OpenBSD was fixed.
- Bugs in
ctrl+arrow
operations in history were fixed. - The ability to paste multiple lines in history was added.
- A
bc
bug, mishandling of array arguments to functions, was fixed. - A crash caused by freeing the wrong pointer was fixed.
- A
dc
bug where strings, in a rare case, were mishandled in parsing was fixed.
In addition, the following changes were made:
- Division was slightly optimized.
- An option was added to the build to disable printing of prompts.
- The special case of empty arguments is now handled. This is to prevent errors in scripts that end up passing empty arguments.
- A harmless bug was fixed. This bug was that, with the pop instructions
(mostly) removed (see below),
bc
would leave extra values on its stack forvoid
functions and in a few other cases. These extra items would not affect anything put on the stack and would not cause any sort of crash or even buggy behavior, but they would causebc
to take more memory than it needed.
On top of the above changes, the following optimizations were added:
- The need for pop instructions in
bc
was removed. - Extra tests on every iteration of the interpreter loop were removed.
- Updating function and code pointers on every iteration of the interpreter loop was changed to only updating them when necessary.
- Extra assignments to pointers were removed.
Altogether, these changes sped up the interpreter by around 2x.
NOTE: This is the last release with new features because this bc
is now
considered complete. From now on, only bug fixes and new translations will be
added to this bc
.
2.0.3
This is a production, bug-fix release.
Two bugs were fixed in this release:
- A rare and subtle signal handling bug was fixed.
- A misbehavior on
0
to a negative power was fixed.
The last bug bears some mentioning.
When I originally wrote power, I did not thoroughly check its error cases;
instead, I had it check if the first number was 0
and then if so, just return
0
. However, 0
to a negative power means that 1
will be divided by 0
,
which is an error.
I caught this, but only after I stopped being cocky. You see, sometime later, I
had noticed that GNU bc
returned an error, correctly, but I thought it was
wrong simply because that's not what my bc
did. I saw it again later and had a
double take. I checked for real, finally, and found out that my bc
was wrong
all along.
That was bad on me. But the bug was easy to fix, so it is fixed now.
There are two other things in this release:
- Subtraction was optimized by Stefan Eßer.
- Division was also optimized, also by Stefan Eßer.
2.0.2
This release contains a fix for a possible overflow in the signal handling. I
would be surprised if any users ran into it because it would only happen after 2
billion (2^31-1
) SIGINT
's, but I saw it and had to fix it.
2.0.1
This release contains very few things that will apply to any users.
- A slight bug in
dc
's interactive mode was fixed. - A bug in the test suite that was only triggered on NetBSD was fixed.
- The
-P
/--no-prompt
option was added for users that do not want a prompt. - A
make check
target was added as an alias formake test
. dc
got its own read prompt:?>
.
2.0.0
This release is a production release.
This release is also a little different from previous releases. From here on
out, I do not plan on adding any more features to this bc
; I believe that it
is complete. However, there may be bug fix releases in the future, if I or any
others manage to find bugs.
This release has only a few new features:
atan2(y, x)
was added to the extended math library as botha2(y, x)
andatan2(y, x)
.- Locales were fixed.
- A POSIX shell-compatible script was added as an alternative to compiling
gen/strgen.c
on a host machine. More details about making the choice between the two can be found by running./configure.sh --help
or reading the build manual. - Multiplication was optimized by using diagonal multiplication, rather than straight brute force.
- The
locale_install.sh
script was fixed. dc
was given the ability to use the environment variableDC_ENV_ARGS
.dc
was also given the ability to use the-i
or--interactive
options.- Printing the prompt was fixed so that it did not print when it shouldn't.
- Signal handling was fixed.
- Handling of
SIGTERM
andSIGQUIT
was fixed. - The built-in functions
maxibase()
,maxobase()
, andmaxscale()
(the commandsT
,U
,V
indc
, respectively) were added to allow scripts to query for the max allowable values of those globals. - Some incompatibilities with POSIX were fixed.
In addition, this release is 2.0.0
for a big reason: the internal format for
numbers changed. They used to be a char
array. Now, they are an array of
larger integers, packing more decimal digits into each integer. This has
delivered HUGE performance improvements, especially for multiplication,
division, and power.
This bc
should now be the fastest bc
available, but I may be wrong.
1.2.8
This release contains a fix for a harmless bug (it is harmless in that it still
works, but it just copies extra data) in the locale_install.sh
script.
1.2.7
This version contains fixes for the build on Arch Linux.
1.2.6
This release removes the use of local
in shell scripts because it's not POSIX
shell-compatible, and also updates a man page that should have been updated a
long time ago but was missed.
1.2.5
This release contains some missing locale *.msg
files.
1.2.4
This release contains a few bug fixes and new French translations.
1.2.3
This release contains a fix for a bug: use of uninitialized data. Such data was only used when outputting an error message, but I am striving for perfection. As Michelangelo said, "Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle."
1.2.2
This release contains fixes for OpenBSD.
1.2.1
This release contains bug fixes for some rare bugs.
1.2.0
This is a production release.
There have been several changes since 1.1.0
:
- The build system had some changes.
- Locale support has been added. (Patches welcome for translations.)
- The ability to turn
ibase
,obase
, andscale
into stacks was added with the-g
command-line option. (See thebc
manual for more details.) - Support for compiling on Mac OSX out of the box was added.
- The extended math library got
t(x)
,ceil(x)
, and some aliases. - The extended math library also got
r2d(x)
(for converting from radians to degrees) andd2r(x)
(for converting from degrees to radians). This is to allow using degrees with the standard library. - Both calculators now accept numbers in scientific notation. See the
bc
manual and thedc
manual for details. - Both calculators can output in either scientific or engineering
notation. See the
bc
manual and thedc
manual for details. - Some inefficiencies were removed.
- Some bugs were fixed.
- Some bugs in the extended library were fixed.
- Some defects from Coverity Scan were fixed.
1.1.4
This release contains a fix to the build system that allows it to build on older
versions of glibc
.
1.1.3
This release contains a fix for a bug in the test suite where bc
tests and
dc
tests could not be run in parallel.
1.1.2
This release has a fix for a history bug; the down arrow did not work.
1.1.1
This release fixes a bug in the 1.1.0
build system. The source is exactly the
same.
The bug that was fixed was a failure to install if no EXECSUFFIX
was used.
1.1.0
This is a production release. However, many new features were added since 1.0
.
- The build system has been changed to use a custom, POSIX
shell-compatible configure script (
configure.sh
) to generate a POSIX make-compatibleMakefile
, which means thatbc
anddc
now build out of the box on any POSIX-compatible system. - Out-of-memory and output errors now cause the
bc
to report the error, clean up, and die, rather than just reporting and trying to continue. - Strings and constants are now garbage collected when possible.
- Signal handling and checking has been made more simple and more thorough.
BcGlobals
was refactored intoBcVm
andBcVm
was made global. Some procedure names were changed to reflect its difference to everything else.- Addition got a speed improvement.
- Some common code for addition and multiplication was refactored into its own procedure.
- A bug was removed where
dc
could have been selected, but the internal#define
that returnedtrue
for a query aboutdc
would not have returnedtrue
. - Useless calls to
bc_num_zero()
were removed. - History support was added. The history support is based off of a
UTF-8 aware fork of
linenoise
, which has been customized withbc
's own data structures and signal handling. - Generating C source from the math library now removes tabs from the library, shrinking the size of the executable.
- The math library was shrunk.
- Error handling and reporting was improved.
- Reallocations were reduced by giving access to the request size for each operation.
abs()
(b
command fordc
) was added as a builtin.- Both calculators were tested on FreeBSD.
- Many obscure parse bugs were fixed.
- Markdown and man page manuals were added, and the man pages are installed by
make install
. - Executable size was reduced, though the added features probably made the executable end up bigger.
- GNU-style array references were added as a supported feature.
- Allocations were reduced.
- New operators were added:
$
($
fordc
),@
(@
fordc
),@=
,<<
(H
fordc
),<<=
,>>
(h
fordc
), and>>=
. See thebc
manual and thedc
manual for more details. - An extended math library was added. This library contains code that
makes it so I can replace my desktop calculator with this
bc
. See thebc
manual for more details. - Support for all capital letters as numbers was added.
- Support for GNU-style void functions was added.
- A bug fix for improper handling of function parameters was added.
- Precedence for the or (
||
) operator was changed to match GNUbc
. dc
was given an explicit negation command.dc
was changed to be able to handle strings in arrays.
1.1 Release Candidate 3
This release is the eighth release candidate for 1.1, though it is the third release candidate meant as a general release candidate. The new code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
1.1 Release Candidate 2
This release is the seventh release candidate for 1.1, though it is the second release candidate meant as a general release candidate. The new code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
1.1 FreeBSD Beta 5
This release is the sixth release candidate for 1.1, though it is the fifth
release candidate meant specifically to test if bc
works on FreeBSD. The new
code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
1.1 FreeBSD Beta 4
This release is the fifth release candidate for 1.1, though it is the fourth
release candidate meant specifically to test if bc
works on FreeBSD. The new
code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
1.1 FreeBSD Beta 3
This release is the fourth release candidate for 1.1, though it is the third
release candidate meant specifically to test if bc
works on FreeBSD. The new
code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
1.1 FreeBSD Beta 2
This release is the third release candidate for 1.1, though it is the second
release candidate meant specifically to test if bc
works on FreeBSD. The new
code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
1.1 FreeBSD Beta 1
This release is the second release candidate for 1.1, though it is meant
specifically to test if bc
works on FreeBSD. The new code has not been tested as
thoroughly as it should for release.
1.1 Release Candidate 1
This is the first release candidate for 1.1. The new code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
1.0
This is the first non-beta release. bc
is ready for production use.
As such, a lot has changed since 0.5.
dc
has been added. It has been tested even more thoroughly thanbc
was for0.5
. It does not have the!
command, and for security reasons, it never will, so it is complete.bc
has been more thoroughly tested. An entire section of the test suite (for both programs) has been added to test for errors.- A prompt (
>>>
) has been added for interactive mode, making it easier to see inputs and outputs. - Interrupt handling has been improved, including elimination of race conditions (as much as possible).
- MinGW and Windows Subsystem for Linux support has been added (see xstatic for binaries).
- Memory leaks and errors have been eliminated (as far as ASan and Valgrind can tell).
- Crashes have been eliminated (as far as afl can tell).
- Karatsuba multiplication was added (and thoroughly) tested, speeding up multiplication and power by orders of magnitude.
- Performance was further enhanced by using a "divmod" function to reduce
redundant divisions and by removing superfluous
memset()
calls. - To switch between Karatsuba and
O(n^2)
multiplication, the config variableBC_NUM_KARATSUBA_LEN
was added. It is set to a sane default, but the optimal number can be found withkaratsuba.py
(requires Python 3) and then configured throughmake
. - The random math test generator script was changed to Python 3 and improved.
bc
anddc
have together been run through 30+ million random tests. - All known math bugs have been fixed, including out of control memory
allocations in
sine
andcosine
(that was actually a parse bug), certain cases of infinite loop on square root, and slight inaccuracies (as much as possible; see the README) in transcendental functions. - Parsing has been fixed as much as possible.
- Test coverage was improved to 94.8%. The only paths not covered are ones
that happen when
malloc()
orrealloc()
fails. - An extension to get the length of an array was added.
- The boolean not (
!
) had its precedence change to match negation. - Data input was hardened.
bc
was made fully compliant with POSIX when the-s
flag is used orPOSIXLY_CORRECT
is defined.- Error handling was improved.
bc
now checks that files it is given are not directories.
1.0 Release Candidate 7
This is the seventh release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 1.0 Release Candidate 6.
1.0 Release Candidate 6
This is the sixth release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 1.0 Release Candidate 5.
1.0 Release Candidate 5
This is the fifth release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 1.0 Release Candidate 4.
1.0 Release Candidate 4
This is the fourth release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 1.0 Release Candidate 3.
1.0 Release Candidate 3
This is the third release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 1.0 Release Candidate 2.
1.0 Release Candidate 2
This is the second release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 1.0 Release Candidate 1.
1.0 Release Candidate 1
This is the first Release Candidate for 1.0. bc
is complete, with dc
, but it
is not tested.
0.5
This beta release completes more features, but it is still not complete nor tested as thoroughly as necessary.
0.4.1
This beta release fixes a few bugs in 0.4.
0.4
This is a beta release. It does not have the complete set of features, and it is not thoroughly tested.