The focus of this version was to refactor the internals so it becomes feasible to create single-binary applications in the future. Refactoring is a boring task and it doesn’t bring many user-visible changes, but it pays in the long run.

Even if the majority of the work went into the internals, this release also managed to sneak in a couple of big features:

Linux namespaces proved to be too cumbersome to use, so this release introduces these new sandboxing technologies for compartmentalised application development.

This release also dropped support for NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, and OpenBSD. These systems just don’t have practical APIs for the userspace developer anymore. The only system from the BSD family that has been keeping itself up-to-date to developer needs has been FreeBSD. Once other BSDs improve their pace, the support for them will be restored.

A focus of future releases will be the creation of a package manager that eases Lua development. Trying to use GUIX as the package manager for Lua programs proved to be a failed experiment (we’ll still release Emilua packages for GUIX in the foreseeable future nonetheless).

Since its last release, Emilua has been packaged for many more Linux distros. Including distros that were already packaging it, now we have:

As usual, you may find up-to-date Windows binaries generated from AppVeyor CI in the Gitlab package registry.

You may find the full changelog in the documentation.