"Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital investment follows this rule, since people generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice." -- Assessment of Ix, Bene Gesserit Archives (Heretics of Dune)
On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 4.2.0, also known as "Ornithopter". Parrot (http://parrot.org) is a virtual machine designed to run all dynamic languages. Parrot 4.2.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site (ftp://ftp.parrot.org/pub/parrot/releases/devel/4.2.0/), 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 4.2.0 News: - API Changes + The signature of getprop was changed from (PMC,String,PMC) to (PMC, PMC,String) for consistency - Core + Parrot Calling Conventions (pcc) now reuses Continuation PMCs internally, which reduces GC work by 25% and improves the fib.pir benchmark by 6% + Winxed snapshot updated to 1.6.devel 44a04cfa7b + Improved the detection of Clang-ish compilers during configuration + Fixed a possible segfault bug when reading packfiles with no constants or main_sub + By default, Parrot has now elevated these GCC warnings to errors during compile time: implicit-function-declaration, undef, missing-braces, nested externs, old-style-definition, strict-prototypes, + The OS Dynamic PMC now has separate functions to unlink a file and remove an empty directory (rmdir) + Fix building on Cygwin due to an improperly named DLL file + Various small bug fixes pointed out by static and dynamic analysis tools - Branches + Work on M0 continues now in the m0 branch, which contains both implementations (currently C and Perl) and specification. + Good progress has been made on the threads branch which builds on the green_threads branch. This gets Parrot much closer to being able to utilize multiple CPU cores seemlessly. More details at http://niner.name/Hybrid_Threads_for_the_Parrot_VM.pdf - Documentation + New release manager documentation for parrot.github.com : http://git.io/parrot-github-guide - Community + Parrot was accepted to Google Summer of Code 2012! Ideas Page: http://git.io/parrot-gsoc-2012 The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are: a960c89f94099c9643c5623263bdb7fa9e97effb889c975382bbf9c0251186b4 parrot-4.2.0.tar.bz2 69ee93d9f81babcff67b747cc614358958a32f274e407b65771ca5a056d4c3d4 parrot-4.2.0.tar.gz Many thanks to all Parrot contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. This release is comprised of 136 commits on the master branch since 4.1.0, with contributions from : Andy Lester, Vasily Chekalkin, Jonathan "Duke" Leto, jkeenan, Alvis Yardley Whiteknight, Brian Gernhardt, Gerhard R, NotFound, Francois Perrad, Moritz Lenz and luben. Our next scheduled release is 17 April 2012. Enjoy! -- Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonat...@leto.net> Leto Labs LLC 209.691.DUKE // http://labs.leto.net NOTE: Personal email is only checked twice a day at 10am/2pm PST, please call/text for time-sensitive matters.