[ANN] About.jl

We could help out with the other issues. Maybe pointing out were things broke and need fixing could help?

About.jl is a great package, hence I believe having this available for everyone on upcoming versions would be a big plus. I have the feeling more contributors will be willing to step in.

Thanks for the kind words, the main issue is that I still haven’t gone through the headache of backporting some breaking changes in StyledStrings.jl to the compat release, and JuliaSyntaxHighlighting.jl needs to then be updated to account for those, but that may also require JuliaSyntax.jl to make new release now that JuliaSyntaxHighlighting.jl has been updated to support the latest version used in 1.12. All this will happen, it’s just a bit of a headache.

Any help would be lovely, and once it’s sorted I’d be keen to collaborate with people on improving About.jl further :slight_smile:

In the mean time About.jl should be fine with Julia 1.9-1.10 and 1.12+, it’s just 1.11 that sits at the intersection of package versions/compatibility that’s a bit of a headache until the above issues are solved.

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I’ve just done a spate of bugfixes, released as v1.0.3 :slight_smile: (diff linked below)

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Thanks to a particularly egregious bug I managed to slip into the last release :see_no_evil_monkey: we already have v1.0.4!

There are two notable improvements that also come with the bugfix(es):

  • Better guessing whether sizeof will work
  • Showing tag bytes used in inlined unions

Showing the tag byte lets you spot that simply reversing the field cuts the memory required for the Int-flavour of this structure by a third.

This is based on observable heuristics, since it’s not exposed, so this may not always be correct, but it seems to work fairly well :slight_smile:

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Thanks for About.jl! The visualization helped me understand Julia’s memory layout for the first time. Super clear and useful for learning how to design data structures.

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