My plan to make 513 the new stable build this week was, as usual, a little off track, but we're still close. As it happened a few more last-minute issues surfaced, so I decided to give it more time while I worked on those as well as dealing with new features.

One of those late bugs was a memory leak that's been around for a bit since 512. It impacted visual contents that were seen by clients, and because it was a hard leak it survived server reboots. Fortunately I was given a good test case to get to the bottom of that, so it was fixed quickly. A bug with regular expressions and UTF-8 was also in the mix; in reality it was a couple of bugs, but we'll call it one because that's how it was recorded.

I'm pleased to say three new operators, representing two feature requests, have already made it into 514 and I'm looking to add a fourth. The three operators already implemented are := the assign-into operator, and ||= and &&= the logical short-circuit assignment operators. The latter two are particularly interesting because they only evaluate the left-hand expression once, so you could do something like list[idx++] ||= value. The fourth operator I want to add is ?[], the null-conditional list operator, which is very similar to the other null-conditional operators but a smidge more complicated because list reads and writes are done in several different ways.

I've also had a request to make init procs capable of a bit more than they currently are, which I think on the whole is pretty reasonable. While init procs are often not the best choice for a project, they do have their place and I think there's room to expand there. Besides which, it's entirely possible that will dovetail with whatever I come up with for a particle syntax.

Thanks a bunch to all of you who've helped support BYOND via Membership, donation, and on other platforms such as Patreon. You guys have been awesome and I'm working to return the love with new features.

For those of you finally enjoying nice weather: keep enjoying! I'm more confused than ever about whether it's safe to grill but I need to bring that baby out of retirement sometime. 'Tis the season to piss off some vegans, so let the meat and cheese flow. Although if your meat is flowing, maybe don't eat it.