Range changes coming

I wanted to give everyone a short heads up. This weekend, I'm planning on retiring the Range C addon forever (at least in terms of my maintenance). Handling the polymorphism in it has been a source of many bugs, and as such I just don't want to have broken software or spend a lot of time fixing bugs that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Therefore, I'm going back to the original plan: Replace it with a pure Io version.

This unfortunately has some consequences (well one): Speed.

When I originally wrote Range, it was pure Io and 70 times slower than it's C version. However, it worked right 100% of the time.

I'm ok with the reduction in speed, as there are other ways we can make pure Io code faster; but I'll defer to Steve for those discussions.

I plan on issuing the pull request this weekend, probably Sunday. I'll follow up to this message when it's done, for comments, before Steve pulls in the change. The only other code I know of in Io that uses Range is the Regex addon, so it has implications there as well (again only performance).

The only code these changes will break is if you have special case code to work around bugs in Range that exist today. As far as I know, nobody is doing that.

Regards,

Jeremy Tregunna