Parrot 3.5.0 "Menelaus" Released!

"Instruct me how to lie in wait for the old god, lest he foreseeing or foreknowing may escape. Hard is a god for mortal man to master."
- Menelaus, The Odyssey, by Homer

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 3.5.0, also known as "Menelaus". Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 3.5.0 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 3.5.0 News:

- Core
  + Parrot_PMC_destroy, Parrot_PMC_mark and Parrot_PMC_invoke were removed from
    the public extension API.
  + PAST now has PAST::Stmt node types, supports reusable temporary registers.
  + Test coverage of the embedding and extending interface is now at least 95%.
  + A snapshot of Winxed is now included in Parrot core to facilitate writing
    core Parrot tools from a higher level language than PIR.
- Languages
  + Winxed
    - Improved compile time scope search.
    - Added 'using namespace' statement.
    - Compiler classes and functions now live in the Winxed;Compiler namespace.
- Tests
  + The Parrot test suite harness now understands the HARNESS_TIMER environment
    variable. Setting it to a true value will show timing results for a test run.
  + IPv6 tests are now parallel testing friendly.

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

06b1462795a2e0c128c6415a362a928e62e9b8b413cb0aa774a7e0502c5f87d0 parrot-3.5.0.tar.bz2
342beb2f9f2e54e0f39e6c128bfe8f9a8550db33e53b6930fc02d37de8953db9 parrot-3.5.0.tar.gz

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. The following people (in random order) contributed to this release. Thanks!

François Perrad, Bob Kuo, Jim Keenan, Bruce Gray, Gerd Pokorra, Christoph Otto, Fitz Elliott, Julian Albo, Peter Lobsinger, Jonathan "Duke" Leto, Kevin Polulak, Andy Lester, Michael H. Hind, Dan Bolser, Vasily Chekalkin, Matt Boyle, Patrick Michaud, Andrew Whitworth and Brian Gernhardt

Our next release is 19 July 2011.

Enjoy!

tags: