Parrot 0.5.0 "Caulked Snack" Released!

On 20 November 2007, chromatic released Parrot 0.5.0. Read on for the Parrot 0.5.0 release announcement.

Jack had avoided looking into his sons' faces during this Oration, because he reckoned they'd not wish to be seen with tears streaming down their faces. But looking up at Jimmy now he saw dry eyes and a quizzical if impatient phizz. Turning the other way, he saw Danny gazing distractedly at the White Tower.

...

"Before you embark on a new life overseas, assuming that is your fate," Jack said, "find Eliza and tell her she is my true love." And then he jerked the chains loose from the restraining grip of first Jimmy, then Danny. He leaned forward, pushed off against the rail with both feet, and launched himself into space above London. His cloak spread in the wind of his flight like the wings of an eagle, revealing, to anyone who might be gazing up into the sky, a lining made from cloth-of-gold that glistered in the rays of the setting sun like the chariot of Apollo. He was on his way down.

— Neal Stephenson, The System of the World

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.5.0 "Caulked Snack." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.5.0 is available from the CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 0.5.0 News:

- Implementation
  + PDD15 (OO) branch merged with trunk; this release contains a working,
    tested implementation of the latest OO model
  + Added pop_eh/push_eh_p/count_eh opcodes
  + Add --runcore command line option
  + Add gcdebug runcore to help track down GC bugs
  + minor improvements to IA-32 JIT
- Documentation
  + PDD19 (PIR): updates to macros, .pcc* directives
  + PDD25 (Concurrency): updated
  + PDD26 (AST):  draft approved
  + PDD23 (Exceptions): draft approved
  + Copyright cleanups
- Languages/Compilers
  + languages/APL: minor updates, PDD15 conformance
  + languages/dotnet: minor updates
  + languages/lua: minor updates, PDD15 conformance
  + languages/lisp: minor updates
  + languages/perl6: minor updates, PDD15 conformance
  + languages/plumhead: minor updates
  + languages/punie: minor updates, PDD15 conformance
  + languages/nqp: minor updates
  + languages/scheme: many updates, PDD15 conformance, improved tests, use
    PMCs instead of primitive registers to represent values
  + languages/tcl: bugfixes, PDD15 conformance
  + languages/WMLScript: minor updates
  + compilers/pirc: updates from PDD19, PDD06
  + compilers/pct: minor updates, PDD15 conformance
  + compilers/pge: PDD15 conformance
  + compilers/tge: PDD15 conformance
- Configuration
  + Improve test coverage
  + Improve reporting when a step fails; allow abort on failure
- Miscellaneous
  + More coding standard conformance, tests, cleanup, speedups,
    warnings cleanup
  + Bug cleanup, esp. GC bugs
  + Eliminate .imc extension (use .pir)
  + Simplify some core config steps to not allow interactive prompting
- Removed
  + clear_eh opcode

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project.

Enjoy!
-- c

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