Parrot 3.4.0 "Pacific Parakeet" Released!

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 3.4.0,
also known as "Pacific Parakeet". Parrot
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 3.4.0 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 3.4.0 News:

- Core
  + The Generational Mark and Sweep garbage collector is the new default.
  + The --gc-nursery-size command line argument was added.
  + Parrot now gets entropy from the underlying OS.
  + The NCI subsystem now supports 8, 16, 32 and 64 bit integers.
  + The NCI subsystem now supports "long long" and "long double" signatures.
    Not all platforms/compilers support these non-standard types, so developers
    are cautioned to take note that using them reduces portability.
  + Many more OpenGL functions in the Parrot OpenGL bindings are available,
    which required the above-mentioned signatures.
  + Bytecode-related embedding api functions moved to src/embed/bytecode.c.
- Languages
  + Winxed
    - Use 'using extern' for module imports.
    - Improved stage 0 prefix ++ and -- operators.
    - Allow 'null' in conditional operator.
    - Several examples are updated.
- Community
  + Google Summer of Code Bonding period is going well. Students are mostly done
    with their classes and much code will flow soon.
- Documentation
  + More PCT introductions are available.

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

87dd6ebe015b711437a77ed9df495bb589e01767d2c39260aabaa7aed098c5e8  parrot-3.4.0.tar.bz2
f6a99f1e97c37f5ee26fc06b61cbe36da01dea383c23ae853fdb396d974ac335  parrot-3.4.0.tar.gz

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project. Our next release is 21 June 2011.

Enjoy!

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