Sass 2.4 will now be Sass 3.0

It’s been more than half a year since the release of Haml and Sass 2.2, and a lot of work has been going on in preparation for the new version. A lot has changed in these past few months, too: there’s been an explosion of interest in Sass and other CSS compilers, a huge amount of work has been put into Compass, and the community is generally abuzz with ideas and excitement.

Because of this surge of energy, the goals for the next version of Sass have shifted dramatically. When we released version 2.2, we were expecting the biggest addition to version 2.4 to be some output-optimization features. Now those have been pushed to a later release in favor of much more major improvements. I’ve talked about some of these improvements already, such as a much more powerful way of dealing with colors and auto-compilation of CSS files. And there are even bigger, more exciting ones in the works.

Since we’re making such huge changes – ones that will in some ways reshape the face of Sass - a minor change from 2.2 to 2.4 feels inadequate. Thus, the next release of Sass will be version 3.0.

What About Haml?

Although Haml and Sass have been growing steadily more distant in terms of their goals, their appeal, and their philosophies, at the moment we have no immediate plans to un-bundle the two of them. This means that (unless Chris convinces me otherwise) the next Haml release will be 3.0 as well.

For various reasons, including both the maturity of Haml as a language and the increased community focus on Sass, Haml has not had development nearly as major as Sass. Moreover, it’s unlikely that it will before the release. Thus, version 3 is a bit of a misnomer, as the changes in Haml will be closer to those expected for a minor release than a major release.

That’s not to say that there aren’t exciting things going on in Haml-land, of course. There are already several neat treats available in the master branch, such as a much-improved html2haml tool, and there are more in the works, including some juicy speed improvements.

When?

I’ve been holding the end of my school’s spring break in my head as a tentative deadline for Sass 3. That puts the tentative release date at March 28. However, I work on Sass in my spare time, so it’s easy for unforseen events and duties to get in the way of expectations.

In the meantime, you can play around with the new features that are in the master branch of the Sass repository. There are two options for using these. The easiest way is probably to install the haml-edge gem by running gem install haml-edge. You can also install Sass by downloading it from GitHub and running rake install in the haml directory.