A new version of statically typed language Ceylon has been released with performance improvements, API optimizations, and new features. The Ceylon IDE also been improved.

Ceylon is a modular, statically typed programming language for Java and JavaScript virtual machines. Ceylon is a designed for writing large programs in teams, and has a static type system, modular architecture, and an Eclipse-based IDE. It is designed to let you create cross-platform modules that execute portably in both virtual machine environments.

The main improvements to Ceylon 1.1 start with better performance, particularly the compilation times in the IDE. The interoperation with Java overloading and Java generics is smoother, and the language comes with out of the box support for deployment of Ceylon modules on OSGi containers.

The Ceylon SDK has also been improved, with three new platform modules - ceylon.promise, ceylon.locale, and ceylon.logging. ceylon.promise provides cross-platform support for promises; ceylon.locale is a cross-platform library for internationalization, and ceylon.logging is a simple logging API. Other modules have been improved, particularly ceylon.language, ceylon.collection, and ceylon.test.

The Ceylon 1.1 IDE now includes with ceylon.formatter, a high-quality code formatter written in Ceylon, and has support for command line tool plugins, including the new ceylon format and ceylon build plugins. It also has integration with vert.x.

Many of the language improvements are designed to give you operators for working with streams.

This release adds support for use-site variance to ensure full interoperability with Java generics. Dynamic interface support has also been added to give a type safe way to interoperate with dynamically typed native JavaScript code. You now get type inference for parameters of anonymous functions that occur in an argument list, and a Byte class has been added that is optimized by the compiler. The language module now includes an API for deploying Ceylon modules programmatically from Java.

The IDE has also been improved, with the addition of a code formatter, seven new refactorings, and lots of new quick fixes and assists. The IDE now has intelliJ-style "chain completion" and completion of toplevel functions applying to a value. The explorer view has been redeveloped to provide better presentation of modules and modular dependencies, and all the keyboard accelerators have been synchronized with the JDT equivalents.

The source code for Ceylon, its specification, and its website is available on GitHub.

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