AtomVM
4 min read

Announcing AtomVM v0.6.5

2024/10/14 Announcing AtomVM v0.6.5

We are pleased to announce the release of v0.6.5 of the AtomVM virtual machine!

First and foremost our apologies to ESP32 users wanting to use all the great new Elixir features added in the V0.6.4 release. The binary images were corrupted and may Elixir features were unavailable. We have fixed the problem and now publish an Elixir flavored image that has a larger library partition. This change necessitates changing the application partition offset to 0x250000. The ExAtomVM mix plugin repository has already been updated with the correct default offset, a new release should be available in the very near future.

Note: We are investigating a bug in the ESP32 i2c driver, that was reported hours before this release, i2c:write_bytes on ESP32 seems to be causing a hard fault, as a workaround use i2c:write_byte instead.

Expanded Erlang support includes:

  • erlang:atom_to_binary/1 that is equivalent to erlang:atom_to_binary(Atom, utf8)
  • is_bitstring/1
  • maps:merge_with/3
  • lists:keytake/3, lists:last/1, lists:mapfoldl/3, and lists:nthtail/2
  • support for handle_continue callback in gen_server
  • gen_server:start_monitor/3,4
  • code:ensure_loaded/1
  • io_lib:latin1_char_list/1
  • io:put_chars/2
  • erlang:list_to_integer/2
  • binary_to_integer/2
  • binary:copy/1,2, binary:split/3, binary:decode_hex/1, and binary:encode_hex/1,2
  • string:find/2,3
  • Support for directory listing using POSIX APIs: (atomvm:posix_opendir/1, atomvm:posix_readdir/1, atomvm:posix_closedir/1)

Expanded Elixir support features:

  • String.Chars protocol, now functions such as Enum.join are able to take also non string parameters; e.g. Enum.join([1, 2], ",")
  • Enumerable protocol
  • Process.send/2, Process.send_after/3/4, and Process.cancel_timer/1
  • List.Chars protocol
  • List.duplicate/2
  • Keyword.split/2
  • IO.chardata_to_string/1
  • Base.decode16/2 and Base.encode16/2
  • Enum.find_index and Enum.find_value support Enumerable and not just lists

Enhancements to the ESP32 platform:

  • The ESP32 platform now includes the esp_adc driver module for using the ADC peripheral to measure analog voltages. Building from source, and including the atomvm_adc component is no longer necessary (or even supported, now that ESP-IDF v4.4.x has been deprecated).
  • Support for mounting/unmounting storage on ESP32 (such as SD or internal flash) using esp:mount/4 and esp:umount/1
  • Made the device_config properties list in spi:open/1 optional (defaults to []), so you can use the function with only a bus_config
  • The network driver supports a callback for beacon lost events (usually encountered when signal quality is poor or network congestion), network:stop/0 works as expected.

Many bugs have been fixed in addition to the previously mentioned fix for ESP32 images, including:

  • Fixed memory corruption in unicode:characters_to_binary
  • Fixed handling of large literal indexes and large extended literal indexes
  • Fixed bogus out_of_memory error when using unicode:characters_to_list on some platforms such as ESP32
  • Fix crash in Elixir library when doing inspect(:atom)
  • General inspect() compliance with Elixir behavior (but there are still some minor differences)
  • On ESP32 uart:open/1,2 now works with uppercase peripheral names
  • Several edge case memory bugs were fixed in the ESP32 network driver, ans when stopped all resources are freed.
  • Fixed a bug in decoding terms that led to some pin numbers being rejected when setting GPIO interrupts on the ESP32 platform.

For the full set of bug fixes, changes and additions consult the Changelog.

Download images and binaries are available for most platforms, except STM32, are available from AtomVM Releases on GitHub. STM32 users as well as anyone needing to build a generic_unix port for a device without release binaries should consult the Build Instructions. MacOS users also have the option of installing with macports.

The git repository and tarballs of the AtomVM source release for all platforms can be found on our GitHub AtomVM page.

Documentation for the v0.6.5 release of the AtomVM virtual machine, including a Getting Started Guide, can be found in the AtomVM Documentation.

As always, tools, drivers, and modules are available on the GitHub AtomVM Project page.

Many thanks go to Davide Bettio, for creating and maintaining such a fine work of software. Special thanks to first time contributors Yuto Oguchi, Rafał Trójniak, Jakub Gonet, and Kevin Schweikert, as well as the rest of the contributors and bug reporters who have helped make this release possible.

The AtomVM team