Parrot 3.2.0 "Nanday Parakeet" Released!

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 3.2.0,
also known as "Nanday Parakeet". Parrot
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 3.2.0 is available on Parrot's FTP
site
, or by following the download
instructions
. For those who want to hack on Parrot or languages that run on top of Parrot,
we recommend our organization page on GitHub,
or you can go directly to the official Parrot Git repo on Github

To clone the the Parrot Git repo into a directory called 'parrot', use the following:

    git clone git://github.com/parrot/parrot.git

If you want it to be in a directory other than 'parrot', then just give that as a second
argument to clone:

    git clone git://github.com/parrot/parrot.git parrot_foo

Parrot 3.2.0 News:

- Core
  + Full support for Unicode filenames on Linux and Win32
  + The configuration option --cxx is gone
  + New Generational GC implemented. To enable it run Configure.pl --gc=gms 
  + Now op definitions are semantically parsed. It opens possibilities for
    future optimizations of parrot core.
  + A statement convert the '.param' PIR systax
  + A PMC is implemented for low-level buffer access which separate the
    representation from the pointers
  + Support added for 'long double', 'long long', and 64-bit to StructView
  + In math.h are tools available for Inf/NaN
  + Signature PMCs are used pervasively
- Languages
  + A few tests in Cardinal are fixed
  + A binary .dmg is created of Rakudo Star for OS X
  + Winxed
    - Minor fixes, refactors and cleaning
    - New predefs replace, push and provide a way to access multiple return
      values
    - Operators exits, class and .* (indirect method call) added
    - $loadlib directive
    - -o option to installable driver added
    - Indent generated PIR is added to improve clarity and avoid imcc pitfalls
      with non indented sub bodys
- Community
  + M0 roadmap is in progress
- Documentation
  + 'make docs' target, which was serving only to generate superfluous POD
    files, has been removed.
  + Svn remnants from PDDs are removed
- Tests
  + Added 'make release_check' target so that Release Manager can double-check
    tarball
  + Probes added for 'long long' and 64-bit C types
- Rosella
  Rosella is a collection of tools and building blocks for Parrot
  + A working proxy library is created, that make mostly-transparent custom
    proxies for many types of Parrot PMCs
  + A mockobject testing library is created, using the new proxy library
  + The PLA test suite is updated to use the new Rosella testing tools,
    including the new mockobjects to test callbacks

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

568b245ce41f9d8f73e306a47b179cc77c7016fe55bd7ae8c91b9e4bb3976884  parrot-3.2.0.tar.bz2
238535c743ef7fa3f98e94d5099d0274e55556f3649e3658566a3dd9f9d3eab5  parrot-3.2.0.tar.gz

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project. Our next release is 19 April 2011.

Enjoy!

tags: