Release Notes for V0.5.3

Announcements
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Hello everyone, V0.5.3 of the SDK is now available for download!

Highlights of what’s new in 0.5.3

The 0.5.3 release includes the following new features and capabilities:

  • Web interface for testing canisters.

To access, with the default dfx.json setup, you can access 127.0.0.1:8000/candid?canisterId=ic:your_canister_id .

  • Bootstrap server shows error messages for a non-existent canister ID.
  • The replica will now use a random port.

Previously, you could set the port of the web server with a fixed port for replica . The replica is now set to a random port so that you can run two dfx start in separate projects without a clash.

Issues fixed in this release

This section covers the issues fixed in this release. The 0.5.3 release includes the following fixes to reported issues:

  • Fix the single return value type on query function in Javascript userlib.
  • The canister list when running dfx build will no longer be randomized.

Known issues and limitations

This section covers any known issues or limitations that might affect how you work with the DFINITY Canister SDK in specific environments or scenarios. If there are workarounds to any of the issues described in this section, you can find them in the Troubleshooting section.

The 0.5.3 release includes the following known issues and limitations:

  • There is a breaking change to Motoko which removes definitions like debugPrint , abs and range from the default scope. You now have to import them through the Motoko standard library.

For help with importing from the standard library, check out this section of the Motoko language reference and also the phonebook tutorial.

  • Float support in the Motoko programming language that is compiled to WebAssembly.

Although Motoko recognizes floating point numbers, there are some limitations related to the deterministic requirements of the Internet Computer that can create issues when compiling Motoko source code that includes floating point data types into WebAssembly for deployment. To simplify the development of test and demonstration programs that run on the current 0.5.3 release, you should avoid using Float data types for now.

  • Using fixed-length Word data type arguments when running dfx commands.

Fixed-length Word32 data types are not yet supported in the dfx command-line interface. As an alternative, you can convert integers to Word32 using the standard library function int32ToWord32(intToInt32(value)) until the support for fixed-length Word32 and Nat32 data types is added.

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