Parrot 0.9.0 "From Outer Space" Released!

[François Perrad]

2009/1/21 chromatic <chromatic at wgz.org>:
>     Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that
>     is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.
>
>     Remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in
>     the future.
>
>     You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The
>     unexplainable. That is why you are here. My friend, we cannot keep
>     this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward
>     the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of
>     ....
>
>   -- "Plan 9 From Outer Space"
>
>   On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.9.0 "From
>   Outer Space." [1]Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all
>   dynamic languages.
>

As usual, the Windows setup is available on
http://parrotwin32.sourceforge.net/

As unusual, Rakudo is broken!

François.

>   Parrot 0.9.0 is available via [2]CPAN (soon), or [3]follow the download
>   instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help
>   develop Parrot itself, we recommend using [4]Subversion on [5]our
>   source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.
>
> Parrot 0.9.0 News:
> - Implementation
>  + Implemented bytecode annotations
>  + Role composition is now aware of multi-subs
>  + Unbuffered IO PMCs now autopromote when buffering is necessary
>  + Installation parrot binary and libparrot shared library now supported
>  + Class registry now respects HLLs
> - Compilers
>  + IMCC
>    - removed keyed string indexing, e.g. $S0[1].
>    - removed slice syntax, e.g. $P0[1..2]
>    - removed .namespace /.endnamespace  pair
>    - fixed 'new $P0, [classname]' syntax
>  + PIRC
>    - refactoring of various data structures
>    - various bug fixes and updates
>    - complete bytecode generation
>    - add '-x' commandline option to run compiled code
>  + PCT
>    - add 'hll' and 'subid' attributes to PAST::Block
>    - refactor loop handling code to handle last/redo/next
>    - add :pasttype('stmts') and :pasttype('null')
>    - improve "scope not found" error message
>    - allow PAST::Val nodes to contain block references
>  + PGE
>    - add "skipkey" option to PGE::OPTable
>    - allow spaces before modifiers in regexes
>    - add '(' ~ ')' goal matching syntax
>    - skip creating a class/grammar if it already exists
> - Languages
>  + Rakudo
>    - improved error mesages in multi dispatch
>    - implemented clone method for all objects
>    - implemented MAIN sub
>    - Unicode versions of infix hyper operators
>    - refactored IO.readline
>    - basic support for Inf and NaN
>    - list and array slices with whatever star
>    - hash slices
>    - implemented last and redo
>    - pointy blocks as terms
>    - refactored variable and parameter passing
>    - improved assignment semantics
>    - improved parsing of type names and subs
>    - mostly implemented parametric roles
>    - separate types for blocks, subs and methods
>    - basic support for submethods
>    - implemented Junction autothreading of user code (not builtins yet)
>    - eval supports :lang attribute
>    - proto makes other subs in scope multis, including in role composition
>  + Befunge
>    - back to working state
>    - ported to pir
>  + Pipp
>    - add support for predefined constant __CLASS__ and __METHOD__
>    - add initial support for static members
>    - add support for namespaced constants
>    - constants are now handled as package vars
>    - variables are now lexical variables
>    - add support for superglobals in functions
>    - Call the class __constructor when there is one
>    - added incomplete support for closures
>    - removed support for the alternative parsing strategies
>    - added support for 'elsif'
>    - added support for 'do-while'
>  + HQ9+
>    - left the nest and is now at https://github.com/bschmalhofer/hq9plus/
>  + Eclectus
>    - left the nest and is now at http://github.com/bschmalhofer/eclectus/
>  + m4
>    - left the nest and is now at http://github.com/bschmalhofer/m4/
>  + Lua:
>    - add a minimalist user back trace
>  + PIR
>    - "does" and "morph" VTABLE interfaces are now overridable from PIR
> - Miscellaneous
>  + Infrastructure
>    - 'make smoke' now generates Smolder reports sent to
>      http://smolder.plusthree.com/app/public_projects/smoke_reports/8
>  + Improved const and null correctness for C function parameters
>  + Sped up STRING manipulation (append, chop), improving PGE about 30%
>  + BOOK
>    - Added sections about Classes, OO programming, and methods.
>    - Added information about Annotations, Exceptions, and Handlers
>  + STM
>    - Removed non-functional STM subsystem
>
>   Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our
>   sponsors for supporting this project. Our next release is 17 February
>   2009.
>
> References
>
>   1. http://parrotcode.org/
>   2. http://search.cpan.org/dist/parrot
>   3. http://parrotcode.org/source.html
>   4. http://subversion.tigris.org/
>   5. https://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk/
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