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Release v1.8.0

Risor v1.8.0 Release

Published May 18, 2025

I'm pleased to announce the v1.8.0 release of Risor, which adds a bevy of new modules and features to make your scripting easier, more fun, and perhaps weirder than ever.

This is the first Risor release in 2025. Sorry about that. While I'd prefer the project have a more regular release cadence, this isn't my sole focus, so it is what it is. I count 44 pull requests merged since the last release, so it truly is a substantial body of work.

A big shout out to my fellow contributors who authored multiple PRs:

Worth a quick call out: Risor is a community project with no commercial backing. It's contributions big and small that keep the project moving and keep my dreams alive. Consider joining in if you find the project interesting!

And eff why eye, I'm @myzie (opens in a new tab) and I started this project back in 2022 as a way to learn more about interpreters. It's continued growing in fits and starts ever since.

Release Highlights

Here's a quick taste of what's new in v1.8.0.

Scheduled Tasks

The new sched module provides several ways to schedule both one-shot and recurring tasks. This lends itself to quickly spinning up a background service with minimal code.

sched.every("1m", func() { print("hello world!") })

Web Crawling

Several new modules provide tools for web crawling and content extraction:

  • playwright for browser automation
  • goquery for HTML parsing and DOM manipulation
  • htmltomarkdown for HTML to Markdown conversion

For example, here's a one-liner using the Risor CLI to fetch a webpage and convert it to Markdown. I love this one. It captures the essence of what Risor is all about. Put some of the best tools available in the Go ecosystem to work for you in a single, concise command.

risor -c 'fetch("https://risor.io").text() | htmltomarkdown | print'

Install and launch Playwright and use it to read the Hacker News headlines:

playwright.install()
 
playwright.goto("https://news.ycombinator.com", func(page) {
    entries := page.locator(".athing").all()
    for i, entry := range entries {
        title := entry.locator("td.title > span > a")
        printf("%d: %s\n", i+1, title.text_content())
    }
})

In fitting with the Risor philosophy, all of these capabilities are baked right into the risor binary so you can just get to work. No fiddling with dependencies or fighting with package managers.

Slack Client

This new module makes it incredibly simple to interact with Slack, including sending messages, querying conversations, uploading files, and more.

client := slack.client(getenv("SLACK_TOKEN"))
 
client.post_message("#project", {text: "Just a test"})
 
client.upload_file("C12X73344SJ", {
    title: "Example File",
    filename: "example.txt",
    content: "This is the file content",
})

QR Codes

QR codes are now pretty mainstream. Turns out they can be easy to generate too. The Risor qrcode module gives you a one-liner to generate a standard QR code. It also allows for more customization of color, image patterns, and whatnot if you like being fancy or unique.

qrcode("https://risor.io").save("qrcode.png")

Now you too can avoid all those horrible ad-filled QR code generator websites. Or make one of your own, high five.

Risor Code Assistant

This isn't technically in the Risor release, but I'm calling it out anyways because it's a recent development and I think it's interesting. Basically, we are at a disadvantage by not being a mainstream language because ChatGPT and Claude know relatively little about Risor. Turns out, they actually do know about it by now, but they don't know it well enough to be useful. So to make LLMs decent at writing Risor, you need to teach them.

The Risor Code Assistant (RCA) (opens in a new tab) is a repository of context files that help LLMs write Risor effectively.

SQL Querying Improvements

The first version of the Risor SQL module would read all rows into memory before returning them to the caller. This release adds an opt-in mode that allows for streaming query results and allows the caller to quit whenever. I know, it should've been this way from the start.

db := sql.connect("sqlite://example.db", {"stream": true}) // <-- opt-in
iterator := db.query("SELECT * FROM events ORDER BY created_at DESC")
for _, row := range iterator {
    print("event:", row.id, row.created_at, row.body)
    if (row.id == 10) { break }
}

Ok, everything can't be a highlight. Switching gears.

Modules

A number of Risor modules were improved, with a general theme of giving Risor scripts access to more Go standard library functionality. The OS related changes go beyond that and are worth a quick call out. The idea with those is to more fully leverage Risor's ability to provide a mock or virtual operating system. This supports script sandboxing and using alternative stdin/stdout, among other things.

Language and Toolchain

In this area, we have some important bug fixes and two improvements that I consider significant. The first is the ability to import modules by path, which supports more natural module organization. The second is improving compiler error messages to make it easier to track down undefined variable and similar errors.

Go Interop

When Risor is used as an embedded library, it has the ability to wrap arbitrary Go types as Risor objects, and to proxy function calls on the types. This allows Risor to be added into existing applications to provide a scripting interface on top of the existing types in the application. Risor's capabilities in this area keep improving. In this release, we added support for a couple less common situations like wrapping struct value types.

Dependencies and Build System

To quickly recap my thinking on Risor's approach to dependencies:

  • The Risor CLI (the risor binary) is meant to be "batteries included". All modules from the core Risor repository are included in the binary that is available for install via Homebrew.
  • When using Risor as a library, the developer is able to choose which Risor modules to use. It should be possible to use a minimal form of Risor that is otherwise dependency-free, or very nearly so.
  • Additional Risor modules can get installed using go get.

This release more fully implements that mindset, at the expense of requiring a couple minor upgrade steps for some Risor library users, who will need to go get install a couple more Risor modules.

Specifically, these four modules must be individually go get installed:

  • github.com/risor-io/risor/modules/color
  • github.com/risor-io/risor/modules/isatty
  • github.com/risor-io/risor/modules/tablewriter
  • github.com/risor-io/risor/modules/yaml

Then provide them as globals, if desired, using the WithGlobals option:

risor.WithGlobals(map[string]any{
    "color":   color.Module(),
    "isatty":  isatty.Module(),
    "tablewriter": tablewriter.Module(),
    "yaml":  yaml.Module(),
})

Get Started or Upgrade

Thanks for taking a look at Risor. It's really easy to try out. Just run brew install risor or build from source:

git clone [email protected]:risor-io/risor.git
cd risor/cmd/risor
go install

I'd love to hear your feedback and see what you're building with Risor. Drop into the GitHub discussions (opens in a new tab) or join the #risor channel on the Gophers Slack (opens in a new tab).

Happy scripting,
@myzie (opens in a new tab)

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