This is a production release with some improvements and no bug fixes. Users do not need to upgrade if they do not want to.
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 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, 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 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.
Note: 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.
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.
This is a production release with fixes for new locales and fixes for compiler warnings on FreeBSD.
This is a production release with a bug fix for Linux, new translations, and new features.
Bug fixes:
BC_ENV_ARGS was broken on Linux in 2.6.1 because glibc's getopt_long() is broken. To get around that, and to support long options on every platform, an adapted version of optparse was added. Now, bc does not even use getopt().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:
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) to p decimal places.ifrand(i, p): Generates an integer with bound i and adds it to frand(p).srand(x): Randomizes the sign of x. In other words, it flips the sign of x with probability 0.5.brand(): Returns a random boolean value (either 0 or 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a production release which addresses portability concerns discovered in the bc build system. No bc code was changed.
configure.sh was added to disable long options if getopt_long() is missing.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.
This is a production release primarily aimed at improving dc.
dc manual were fixed.dc startup was optimized by making sure it didn't have to set up bc-only things.bc && and || operators were made available to dc through the M and m 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.
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.
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.
This is a production release with changes to the build system.
This release is a production release. It only has new features and performance improvements.
sqrt(x) was improved.root(x, n) was added to the extended math library to calculate nth roots.cbrt(x) was added to the extended math library to calculate cube roots.This is a non-critical release; it just changes the build system, and in non-breaking ways:
configure.sh that caused long option parsing to fail under bash was fixed.This release is not a critical release.
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.
This release is a production release.
The following bugs were fixed:
dc bug that caused stack mishandling was fixed.ctrl+arrow operations in history were fixed.bc bug, mishandling of array arguments to functions, was fixed.dc bug where strings, in a rare case, were mishandled in parsing was fixed.In addition, the following changes were made:
bc would leave extra values on its stack for void 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 cause bc to take more memory than it needed.On top of the above changes, the following optimizations were added:
bc was 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.
This is a production, bug-fix release.
Two bugs were fixed in this release:
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:
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.
This release contains very few things that will apply to any users.
dc's interactive mode was fixed.-P/--no-prompt option was added for users that do not want a prompt.make check target was added as an alias for make test.dc got its own read prompt: ?> .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 both a2(y, x) and atan2(y, x).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.locale_install.sh script was fixed.dc was given the ability to use the environment variable DC_ENV_ARGS.dc was also given the ability to use the -i or --interactive options.SIGTERM and SIGQUIT was fixed.maxibase(), maxobase(), and maxscale() (the commands T, U, V in dc, respectively) were added to allow scripts to query for the max allowable values of those globals.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.
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.
This version contains fixes for the build on Arch Linux.
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.
This release contains some missing locale *.msg files.
This release contains a few bug fixes and new French translations.
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."
This release contains fixes for OpenBSD.
This release contains bug fixes for some rare bugs.
This is a production release.
There have been several changes since 1.1.0:
ibase, obase, and scale into stacks was added with the -g command-line option. (See the bc manual for more details.)t(x), ceil(x), and some aliases.r2d(x) (for converting from radians to degrees) and d2r(x) (for converting from degrees to radians). This is to allow using degrees with the standard library.bc manual and the dc manual for details.bc manual and the dc manual for details.This release contains a fix to the build system that allows it to build on older versions of glibc.
This release contains a fix for a bug in the test suite where bc tests and dc tests could not be run in parallel.
This release has a fix for a history bug; the down arrow did not work.
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.
This is a production release. However, many new features were added since 1.0.
configure.sh) to generate a POSIX make-compatible Makefile, which means that bc and dc now build out of the box on any POSIX-compatible system.bc to report the error, clean up, and die, rather than just reporting and trying to continue.BcGlobals was refactored into BcVm and BcVm was made global. Some procedure names were changed to reflect its difference to everything else.dc could have been selected, but the internal #define that returned true for a query about dc would not have returned true.bc_num_zero() were removed.linenoise, which has been customized with bc's own data structures and signal handling.abs() (b command for dc) was added as a builtin.make install.$ ($ for dc), @ (@ for dc), @=, << (H for dc), <<=, >> (h for dc), and >>=. See the bc manual and the dc manual for more details.bc. See the bc manual for more details.||) operator was changed to match GNU bc.dc was given an explicit negation command.dc was changed to be able to handle strings in arrays.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first release candidate for 1.1. The new code has not been tested as thoroughly as it should for release.
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 than bc was for 0.5. 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.>>> ) has been added for interactive mode, making it easier to see inputs and outputs.memset() calls.O(n^2) multiplication, the config variable BC_NUM_KARATSUBA_LEN was added. It is set to a sane default, but the optimal number can be found with karatsuba.py (requires Python 3) and then configured through make.bc and dc have together been run through 30+ million random tests.sine and cosine (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.malloc() or realloc() fails.!) had its precedence change to match negation.bc was made fully compliant with POSIX when the -s flag is used or POSIXLY_CORRECT is defined.bc now checks that files it is given are not directories.This is the seventh release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 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.
This is the fifth release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 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.
This is the third release candidate for 1.0. It fixes a few bugs in 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.
This is the first Release Candidate for 1.0. bc is complete, with dc, but it is not tested.
This beta release completes more features, but it is still not complete nor tested as thoroughly as necessary.
This beta release fixes a few bugs in 0.4.
This is a beta release. It does not have the complete set of features, and it is not thoroughly tested.