Parrot 5.9.0 "Fantastick Parrot" Released!

    Try to remember the kind of September
    When life was slow and, oh, so mellow.
    Try to remember the kind of September
    When grass was green and grain was yellow.
        -- El Gallo in "The Fantasticks"
           (World's Longest Running Musical)

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 5.9.0, also known as "Fantastick Parrot". Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 5.9.0 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 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 5.9.0 News:

    - Core
        + Don't complain about utf8 multibyte characters split by chunk boundaries
        + Fixed readall SEGV at eof, e.g. when calling readall twice [GH #981]
        + Fixed SEGV when .const not found. [GH #996]
        + Added PackfileView-compatible methods to EvalPMC. [GH #937] (Temporary)
    - Build
        + Fixed MacOSX -Wno-long-double warning [GH #980]
    - Testing
        + Sorted hash keys to allow better diffs between runs of `make fulltest`.
    - Branches
        + The new-packfile-api branch with the final removal of the EvalPMC
          is ready and will most likely land in 5.10.0
    - Documentation
        + Fixed and improved the documentation about Parrot_str_new
    - Community
        + Zefram reported 31 issues. Thanks a lot!
        + All three of our GSoC students completed their projects, and passed
          their finals with flying colors. Congratulations! Their weekly reports
          are available here:
            = Saurabh Kumar - "Update parrot-libgit2 to latest libgit2 release"
                http://www.parrot.org/tags/parrot-libgit2
            = Paweł Murias - "A Javascript backend for Rakudo"
                http://parrot.org/blog/1850
            = Denis Boyun  - "Improve Web UI of App::Parrot::Create"
                http://parrot.org/blog/1843

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

52d2e7c33ba9b2c3ed692738af8a27b13c838d45790cee0609e116c724d3d7b4 parrot-5.9.0.tar.gz
b4704231d90ddec827f45f945b9ad13dd4f9dc7cc9bc0cfc97ab6e30ec1c38ca parrot-5.9.0.tar.bz2

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next release is 19 Nov 2013.

Enjoy!