Parrot 6.5.0 "Black-winged Lovebird" Released

Reini Urban rurban at x-ray.at
Tue Jun 17 16:18:38 UTC 2014


On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 6.5.0, also known
as "Black-winged Lovebird".  Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual
machine aimed
at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 6.5.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site
(ftp://ftp.parrot.org/pub/parrot/releases/devel/6.5.0/), 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 6.5.0 News:
    - Core
        + Re-add -DMEMORY_DEBUG support to the new GMS GC [GH #1073]
        + Added 2 new PMC method attributes :manual_wb and :no_wb and
          worked over all core PMCs for unneeded GC write barriers.
          Thereby removed the vtable method calling overhead of _orig into a
          wrapper with the mandatory write barrier. This was the first part
          of Chirag's GSOC project. [GH #1069]
        + find_codepoint: Added name aliases for control character names which
          disappeared with ICU 5.2, and added those names to non-ICU
builds also.
          Improved ICU search for u_charFromName() to check all
UCharNameChoices,
          not only U_EXTENDED_CHAR_NAME. [GH #1075, roast #43]
    - Build
        + Fixed wrong ICU header probes on multi-arch systems (debian)
[GH #1014]
        + Fix opengl on bsd which does not have __APPLE__ defined as 0
[GH #1070]
        + pmc2c was extended to improve write barriers and deal with :manual_wb,
          :no_wb and RETURN() in VTABLE methods. [GH #1069]
    - Documentation
        + Improved the docs for pmc and pmc2c [GH #1069]
+ Harmonized pmc names for the PMC html index [GH #1079]
    - Tests
        + Fix t/op/gc.t for --gc=inf
        + Fix t/library/pcre.t for --without-pcre or windows
    - Community
        + Our GSOC project succeeded in the first deliverable
        + Non-core dynpmc's with multiple return paths in writer
VTABLE methods will
          need to be changed to use either :manual_wb or RETURN() as
in PCCMETHODs,
          and can now be optimized for unneeded GC write barriers.
          E.g. nqp 6model got 2-4% faster.

nqp should be bumped.
Fixes for nqp:
* icu detection on multi-arch systems (newer debian),
* icu workaround for control char name aliases (see roast #43),
* better GC writer barriers (for 6model in nqp branch pmc2c_orig)
parrot -O2 is not yet recommended for nqp/rakudo as it produced slower
code there.

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:
249047f8fc2041ce460d3524547c10faf4462facdffd6b4f9b42f250640c79de
parrot-6.5.0.tar.gz
1f45044f8dcfaafef795e93a91c8f4a55dd8347cc0359ce4dcf6f34f7bfff140
parrot-6.5.0.tar.bz2

Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project.  Our next scheduled release is 15 Jul 2014.

Enjoy!

-- 
Reini Urban
http://cpanel.net/   http://www.perl-compiler.org/


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