Parrot 3.0.0 "Beef Stew" Released

[Christoph Otto]

"I think my imagination's broke.  Lemme try and think up the best thing ever. 
  Umm... beef... stew.  Yup it's busted alright.  I'm gonna go... place."
  - Strong Bad, http://hrwiki.org/wiki/different_town

On behalf of the Parrot team and an enthusiastic but undiscriminating 
dachshund that followed me home last week, I'm proud to announce Parrot 3.0.0, 
also known as "Beef Stew", or at the insistence of a shadowy government 
organization, "Snowflake".  Parrot (http://parrot.org) is a virtual machine 
that dreams about running all dynamic languages everywhere, even the one 
you're think about right now.  Parrot has big plans, even if needs a haircut 
and sometimes goes outside with its shoes untied.

Parrot 3.0.0 is available from an Internet near you.  Instructions on fetching 
and building are at http://parrot.org/download, or you can go directly to 
http://ftp.parrot.org/releases/stable/3.0.0/ and grab it there.  As a special 
incentive, the first 255 downloaders will receive a limited-edition byte 
autographed by John de Lancie.   If you're interested in helping improve 
Parrot or if you just happen to find a misplaced lolcat in our documentation, 
you can fork Parrot on GitHub at http://github.com/parrot/parrot and send us 
your fix as a pull request.  Please be aware that due to our stringent 
security policy, we are not able to accept malicious pull requests with the 
evil bit set.  If you would like to submit a malicious pull request, please 
verify that the evil bit has not been set.

Here are some highlights from this release:
- Core
   + A new embedding API is available in "parrot/api.h" and documented in
     docs/pdd/pdd10_embedding.pod .
   + Packfile PMCs were refactored and can now be used to produce runnable
     bytecode.
   + Packfile manipulation code now throws embedder-friendly exceptions rather
     than printing error details directly to stderr.
   + Unicode support for file IO, environment variables, program names, and
     command-line parameters was improved.
   + An experimental gdb pretty-printers in tools/dev for Parrot STRINGs and
     PMCs is now available.  (gdb 7.2 or later and Python are required)
   + c2str.pl and pmc2c.pl improvements result in a noticeably faster build.
   + Bugs in our Digest::sha256 library and bit-related dynamic ops were fixed
     by GCI student Nolan Lum. Both now work correctly on 32 and 64 bit
     systems.
- Languages
   + Ωη;)XD - OMeta for Winxed https://github.com/plobsing/ohm-eta-wink-kzd
- Community
   + tree-optimization by GSoC student Tyler L. Curtis joined the nest and now
     lives at http://github.com/parrot/tree-optimization .
   + Plumage now lives at http://github.com/parrot/plumage and is installable.
   + Christmas went as scheduled.  The Parrot team does not take credit for
     this event.
- Documentation
   + HTML documentation generation has been rewritten and greatly simplified.
   + We have improved documentation in docs/project/git_workflow.pod about
     keeping a fork of parrot.git in sync.
   + Translations of our README in various languages are now in the
     docs/translation directory, thanks to Google Code-In students.
- Tests
   + A better way to write "todo" tests with Parrot's Test::More was implemented
     by GCI student Fernando Brito.
   + Major increases in test coverage of many core PMCs, dynamic PMCs and
     dynamic opcodes resulted from GCI and the intrepid students it attracted.
   + Jonathan "Duke" Leto set up Debian Linux x86_64 and sparc32 smokers
     in the GCC Compile Farm, which continually submit smoke reports with
     a variety of configuration options and compilers.  Thanks, GCC!
   + Makefile dependency checking is now automatically tested, resulting in a
     more reliable parallel build.
   + Coverage tests were improved for platforms with and without Devel::Cover.


Many thanks to all our contributors for making this release possible and to 
our sponsors for supporting this project.  Special thanks go out to Peter 
Lobsinger and his language Ωη;)XD for breaking nearly everything it touches by 
mere virtue of its name.  Our next scheduled release, 3.1.0, is scheduled for 
February 15th, 2011 and will most likely not be named "Snowflake".

Thanks are due to the following people who made Parrot 3.0.0 happen. 
Contributors marked with "(gci)" made contributions as part of Google Code-In. 
  We're grateful to Google for sponsoring GCI and providing us with a small 
army of energetic and highly capable minions.

Andrew Whitworth, Andy Dougherty, Andy Lester, Bob Rogers, Christoph Otto, 
Daniel Arbelo, Daniel Kang (gci), Daniel Toma, David Czech (gci), Fernando 
Brito (gci), François Perrad, Gerd Pokorra, Jim Keenan, Jonathan "Duke" Leto, 
Julian Albo, Léo Grange (gci), Mariano Wahlmann, Matt Rajca (gci), Michael H. 
Hind, Natan Yellin (gci), Nick Wellnhofer, Nolan Lum (gci), Paul Johnson, 
Peter Lobsinger, Tony Young (gci), Vasily Chekalkin, Will Coleda


Enjoy!