Parrot 3.4.0 "Pacific Parakeet" Released!

[Gerd Pokorra]

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 3.4.0, also
known as "Pacific Parakeet".  Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual
machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 3.4.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site
(ftp://ftp.parrot.org/pub/parrot/releases/devel/3.4.0/), or by following
the download instructions at http://parrot.org/download.  For those who
would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we
recommend using Git to retrieve the source code to get the latest and
best Parrot code.

Parrot 3.4.0 News:
- Core
  + The Generational Mark and Sweep garbage collector is the new
default.
  + The --gc-nursery-size command line argument was added.
  + Parrot now gets entropy from the underlying OS.
  + The NCI subsystem now supports 8, 16, 32 and 64 bit integers.
  + The NCI subsystem now supports "long long" and "long double"
signatures.
    Not all platforms/compilers support these non-standard types, so
developers
    are cautioned to take note that using them reduces portability.
  + Many more OpenGL functions in the Parrot OpenGL bindings are
available,
    which required the above-mentioned signatures.
  + Bytecode-related embedding api functions moved to
src/embed/bytecode.c.
- Languages
  + Winxed
    - Use 'using extern' for module imports.
    - Improved stage 0 prefix ++ and -- operators.
    - Allow 'null' in conditional operator.
    - Several examples are updated.
- Community
  + Google Summer of Code Bonding period is going well. Students are
mostly done
    with their classes and much code will flow soon.
- Documentation
  + More PCT introductions are available at:
http://github.com/benabik/cish


The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:
87dd6ebe015b711437a77ed9df495bb589e01767d2c39260aabaa7aed098c5e8
parrot-3.4.0.tar.bz2
f6a99f1e97c37f5ee26fc06b61cbe36da01dea383c23ae853fdb396d974ac335
parrot-3.4.0.tar.gz


Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our
sponsors for supporting this project.  
Our next scheduled release is 21 June 2011.

Enjoy!