`ludic help` ended with a section titled "contributing to the toolchain itself",
listing bootstrap, reseed, docs-gen and release tasks. None of that is available
to someone who installed the language — those tasks need the repository — so the
shipped tool was advertising work its user cannot do, in a namespace they have to
read past to find `new` and `run`.
The tasks move to a second program, dev.ludic -> bin/ludic-dev, built from a
checkout and excluded from every release artifact. `ludic` keeps the project and
package commands and nothing else; `ludic dev …` now explains where the tasks
went instead of failing as an unknown command.
What this shook out: the two programs share prelude/build/project/pkg, so the
helpers each had accreted in whichever file first needed them — cc(),
ensure_ludicc, the string functions, title_case, cmd_version — moved to where
both can see them. The argument-shift indirection added for the `dev` namespace
is gone with the namespace, so commands read argv directly again.
`ludic-dev test` asserts the split rather than trusting it: the staged install
must build a project, and `ludic dev build` there must fail while naming
ludic-dev. install.sh keeps building older tags, whose bootstrap goes through
main.ludic.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Getting started meant cloning the repository, bootstrapping a compiler and
learning a task runner called `x`. That is a contributor's workflow handed to
everyone who wants to try the language.
Installing is now one command:
curl -fsSL https://workshopsoft.pages.workshopsoft.io/ludic/install.sh | sh
install.sh puts a complete toolchain — compiler, CLI, engine runtime, bundled
ludic.* packages, formatter, language server — in ~/.ludic and adds it to PATH.
Prebuilt artifacts are checksum-verified; where a platform has none, or the
release predates this layout, it bootstraps from the compiler's own IR seed with
clang. The docs site publishes the script beside the pages that quote it, so the
page and the script can never come from different releases.
`x` becomes `ludic`, and the surface splits by audience. A user of the language
sees `new`, `run`, `build`, `test`, `add`, `fmt`, `lsp`, `doctor`, `upgrade`;
`ludic new` scaffolds a project that builds and plays as it stands. Everything
the toolchain repo needs moved under `ludic dev` — build, test, reseed,
bootstrap-cfree, docs-gen, release — unchanged apart from the namespace. Those
tasks read arguments one position further along, so dispatch_dev sets a shift
and commands use arg_n()/arg_total() rather than each knowing its own depth.
Release artifacts become complete install roots (bin/ beside runtime/, packages/
and VERSION) rather than bare binaries, which is what the installer unpacks.
`ludic dev test` asserts the whole shape: it stages an install, puts it on PATH
with no LUDIC_HOME, and runs new -> build -> test through it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
build_section piped every changeset body through `tr '\n' ' '`. A multi-line
changeset came out as one paragraph, so nested bullets rendered as inline
" - " runs and a whole release read as a single unbroken block — v0.3.0 was one
~4 KB bullet.
The renderer is now Ludic rather than a shell one-liner. A section is grouped
by conventional-commit type (Features, Fixes, Performance, ...), each changeset
is one bullet, and continuation lines are indented two spaces so nested lists
and paragraphs stay inside their item. Bullets are sorted within a group, so
cutting the same release twice produces the same text.
Also:
- `x release --dry-run` renders the pending section to stdout and touches
nothing, so a release can be read before it is cut.
- `x changelog-render` re-renders a section from a directory of changesets, and
`x changelog-section` prints one release's section back out of CHANGELOG.md.
- The v0.1.0 and v0.3.0 sections are re-rendered with the former, from the
changesets recovered at each tag's parent commit; the bullet counts (6 and
25) and word multisets are unchanged. v0.2.0 is left alone: it carries a
hand-written summary and topical subheadings, and regenerating it would have
replaced curation with raw changeset dumps. The file header now says that
a section may carry such a summary, since it previously claimed released
sections are never hand-edited.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The project had no versioning discipline: 0 tags, no CHANGELOG, no way for the
compiler to report a version. Add a lightweight, native release flow.
- Versioning: SemVer, with VERSION as the single source of truth. `ludicc
--version` (and `ludic --version`) read it at runtime — so a bump touches one
file and never reseeds the compiler. `x version` reports it too.
- Changesets: one small Markdown file per user-facing change under changes/
(bump level + type + summary; see changes/README.md). This replaces "remember
to edit the changelog" with a mergeable artifact, no Node changeset tool.
- `x release [major|minor|patch] [--publish]`: fold the pending changesets into a
new CHANGELOG.md section (grouped by type), bump VERSION, commit, and tag
vX.Y.Z. The level defaults to the highest changeset bump. `--publish` also
pushes and creates the Forgejo release with source + toolchain tarballs;
tools/ci/forgejo_release.py is the small stdlib-Python HTTP glue for the
release API (a native Http client is issue #6).
Seed the initial changesets describing the shipped surface; the first `x release`
turns them into the v0.1.0 CHANGELOG. Reseeded for the --version flag; C-free
bootstrap fixpoint holds; suites 56 / 29 / 29 on macOS, 51 / 28 (+skips) on Linux
CI, bootstrap-cfree byte-identical on both.
Part of the repository-cleanup / DX pass (with #32, #34).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
