Solidity 0.6.12 Release Announcement

Solidity v0.6.12 adds more flexibility when using inheritance with NatSpec comments and introduces many small improvements to the optimizer.

Notable New Features

NatSpec Inheritance

As explained in the Solidity 0.6.11 release announcement, NatSpec comments are now inherited automatically if you do not provide any NatSpec in the derived function. Starting from Solidity 0.6.12, you can explicitly inherit comments from a base contract using the tag @inheritdoc even if you specify some of the tags. The tags that are not given will then be taken from the specified base class' function.

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.6.11;
interface Gathering {
  /// The address `participant` just registered for the gathering.
  event Registered(address participant);

  /// Registers `msg.sender` to take part in the gathering.
  /// @param name The name of the participant.
  function register(string calldata name) external;
}

contract MyGathering is Gathering {
  mapping(address => string) public participants;
  uint public participantCount;

  /// Registers `msg.sender` to take part in the gathering
  /// unless there are already more than 10 participants.
  /// @inheritdoc Gathering
  function register(string calldata name) public override {
    require(participantCount <= 10);
    participants[msg.sender] = name;
    participantCount++;
    emit Registered(msg.sender);
  }
}

The derived contract MyGathering in the example code above will have the documentation for the parameter "name" as part of its developer documentation.

Full Changelog

Language Features:

• NatSpec: Implement tag @inheritdoc to copy documentation from a specific base contract.
• Wasm backend: Add i32.ctz, i64.ctz, i32.popcnt, and i64.popcnt.

Compiler Features:

• Code Generator: Avoid double cleanup when copying to memory.
• Code Generator: Evaluate keccak256 of string literals at compile-time.
• Optimizer: Add rule to remove shifts inside the byte opcode.
• Peephole Optimizer: Add rule to remove swap after dup.
• Peephole Optimizer: Remove unnecessary masking of tags.
• Yul EVM Code Transform: Free stack slots directly after visiting the right-hand-side of variable declarations instead of at the end of the statement only.

Bugfixes:

• SMTChecker: Fix error in events with indices of type static array.
• SMTChecker: Fix internal error in sequential storage array pushes (push().push()).
• SMTChecker: Fix internal error when using bitwise operators on fixed bytes type.
• SMTChecker: Fix internal error when using compound bitwise operator assignments on array indices inside branches.
• Type Checker: Fix internal compiler error related to oversized types.
• Type Checker: Fix overload resolution in combination with {value: ...}.

Build System:

• Update internal dependency of jsoncpp to 1.9.3.

A big thank you to all contributors who helped make this release possible!

Download the new version of Solidity here.