[Parrot-users] Parrot 2.8.0 "Tui Parakeet" Released!

[Gerd Pokorra]

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 2.8.0
"Tui Parakeet". Parrot [0] is a virtual machine aimed
at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 2.8.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the
download instructions [1]. 
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.

[0] - http://parrot.org/
[1] - http://parrot.org/download 

Parrot 2.8.0 News:
- Core
  + Inlined hashing and comparison functions
  + Hash memory allocation moved from system malloc to lazy allocated
  + Avoided infinite catching of exceptions while dying from exception
  + Some svn fixes
  + Added a check for duplicate vtable entries in PMCs
  + Building Parrot with Perl 5.12 and gcc-4.5 / g++-4.5
  + Eliminated cruft left over after dynops_mapping
  + Improved charset and string encoding
  + Better organisation of programs by reposition it to "tools/build"
    and "tools/release"
  + Implemented Exception clone vtable function
  + Added experimental function Parrot_getpid and getpid method
  + command line argument "--gc-threshold" added, which controls
    the memory wasted by the GC
  + Closed a lot of tickets
- Testing
  + Added more core pmc tests
  + Rearranged some tests with C coverage
  + We now have Smolder back, at http://smolder.parrot.org .
    Submit reports with "make smoke"
  + skip_all implementation in Parrot's Test::More completed
- GitMigration
  + Set up a test site for github trac plugin at http://mksig.org/trac/
  + Code of Trac plugin at github is on
        http://github.com/cotto/github-trac
  + Parrot is now mirrored on github at http://github.com/parrot/parrot
- Compilers
  + Fixed problem with imcc HLL in load_bytecode difference between
    loading a pbc and compiling a pir


Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our
sponsors for supporting this project. Our next scheduled release is 19
October 2010.

Enjoy!