[Parrot-users] Parrot 2.4.0 "Sulfur Crest"

[Andrew Whitworth]

"So there me was beating boulder into powder because me couldn't eat it,
and magic ball land in lap. Naturally me think, "All right, free egg." because
me stupid and me caveman. So me spent about three days humping and bust open
with thigh bone so me could eat it good. Then magic ball shoot Oog with beam,
and next thing me know me go out and invent wheel out of dinosaur brain. Magic
dino wheel rolls for three short distance until me eat it. The point is, me get
smarter. Soon me walk upright, me feather back dirty, matted hair into wings
for style, and me stop to use bathroom as opposed to me just doing it as me
walk. " -- Oog, Aqua Teen Hunger Force


On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 2.4.0
"Sulfur Crest." Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed
at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 2.4.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow 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 Subversion
on the source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 2.4.0 News:
- Core
 + Various long-standing bugs in IMCC were fixed
 + STRINGs are now immutable.
 + use STRINGNULL instead of NULL when working with strings
 + Fixed storage of methods in the NameSpace PMC
 + Added :nsentry flag to force method to be stored in the NameSpace
 + Added StringBuilder and PackfileDebug PMCs
 + Added experimental opcodes find_codepoint and unroll
- Compilers
 + Fixed reporting of line numbers in IMCC
 + Removed deprecated NQP compiler, replaced with new NQP-RX
 + Removed NCIGen compiler
- Deprecations
 + Tools to distribute on CPAN were removed
 + Deprecated dynpmcs have been removed to external repositories
 + Removed RetContinuation PMC
 + Removed CGoto, CGP, and Switch runcores
- Tests
 + Many tests for the extend/embed interface were added
 + done_testing() is now implemented in Test::More
- Tools
 + The fakexecutable tapir is renamed parrot-prove
 + Performance fixes to the pbc_to_exe tool
 + Fix data_json to work outside of trunk
 + The dynpmc GzipHandle (zlib wrapper) was added
 + The library Archive/Tar.pir was added.
 + The library Archive/Zip.pir was added.
 + The libraries LWP.pir, HTTP/Message.pir & URI.pir were added.
- Miscellaneous
 + Six Parrot-related projects accepted to GSoC
 + Improve use of const and other compiler hints


Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project.  Our next scheduled release is 15 June 2010.

Enjoy!


--Andrew Whitworth