LuaTeX 1.0 announced

Big congratulations from us to the LuaTeX Team for achieving this hugely important milestone! It was very much awaited and we are looking forward to seeing more code in the LaTeX world that makes use of the extended possibilities offered by the LuaTeX engine now that it has reached a stable state.

Congrats!

Here is the original announcement from the LuaTeX Team

Version 1.0.0

After some ten years of development and testing, today we have released LuaTeX 1.0.0! Instead of staying below one and ending up with versions like 0.99.1234, we decided that the moment is there to show the TeX audience that LuaTeX is stable enough to loose its beta status. Although functionality has evolved and sometimes been replaced, we have been using LuaTeX in production right from the start. Of course there are bugs and for sure we will fix them.

Our main objective is to provide a variant of TeX that permits user extensions without the need to adapt the inner workings. We did add a few things here and there but they mostly relate to opening up the inner parts and/or the wish to influence some hard coded behaviour. Via Lua we managed to support modern functionality without bloating the code or adding more and more dependencies on foreign code. In the process a stable and flexible MetaPost library became part of the engine.

The functionality as present now will stay. We might open up some more parts, we will stepwise clean up the code base while staying as close as possible to the Knuthian original, we will try to document bits and pieces. We might also experiment a bit with better isolation of the backend, and simplify some internals. For that we might use the experimental version but if we divert too much we may need to give that another name.

We want to thank all those who have tested the betas and helped to make LuaTeX better.

Hans Hagen, Hartmut Henkel, Taco Hoekwater, Luigi Scarso