Parrot 6.10.0 "New Caledonian lorikeet" released

    Now instead of four in the eights place
    You've got three,
    'Cause you added one,
    That is to say, eight, to the two,
    But you can't take seven from three,
    So you look at the sixty-fours...

    Sixty-four?  "How did sixty-four get into it?"  I hear you cry!
    Well, sixty-four is eight squared, don't you see?
        -- Tom Lehrer, "New Math"
            (Which starts in decimal, but ends in octal)

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 6.10.0, also known as "New Caledonian lorikeet". Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 6.10.0 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 6.10.0 News:

    - Core
        + Add imcc -d2 flag for MKCONST tracing.
        + Fix darwin --m=32 Parrot_sysmem_amount() #1113
        + Honor rlimit settings on all non-windows platforms. #935
        + Slightly improved mark methods for Coroutine, Continuation,
          CallContext, NCI, Task. #1109
        + Unify code for platform encodings, now supports all. #1120
          e.g. unicode filenames or UTF-8 term output on cygwin, solaris, dragonfly
        + Update pcre for cygwin
        + Add more -D flags for --ccflags=-DMEMORY_DEBUG #1108.
          Print initial memory settings on -D1 and more with -D101 and -D200.
        + Added -t10 trace flag for pmc flags, prettier -t output, less GC stress.
        + Fixed GC bug in Coroutine.clone #1108, #1109
        + Export Parrot_io_get_vtable. #1131
        + Added lstat io op for nqp, fixed os.lstat method. #1129
        + Throw errors on illegal seek arguments, no assertions. #1130
        + Disallow negative count argument for array splice methods. GH #766
        + Allow array negative index access for most arrays. #1127
        + Shorten and harmonize array exception messages: no context, just:
          index out of bounds, illegal argument, can't resize, ... #1126
        + Add simplier Parrot_ex_throw_from_c_noargs. #1132
        + Fix all wrong exception codes left-overs, 0, 1 or -1. #1133
        + Unescape double-quoted .lex string constants. #1095, perl6 RT#116643
        + Downgrade external ascii strings on multi-byte platform encodings
          to ascii. #1098
        + Fix self heuristic with vtable overridden method calls.
          $P0($P0) instead of $P0() is now invalid, it is always a method.
          https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/103 #1013
    - Build
        + Set -mabi=64 for gcc --m=64 on mips, -m64 on powerpc #1110
        + Add --{en,dis}able-static #1104
        + Fix Windows build for pbc_to_exe #1114
        + Fix default cygwin builds #1116
        + Silence failing auto::inline probe #1118
        + Revert automatic regeneration of encoding tables, added with 6.9.0. #1119
        + Use labs() instead of abs() with 64-bit #1111
        + Avoid duplicate src/longopt.o, export Parrot_longopt_get. #1121
        + Detect icu version, new icu_version config key. #867
        + Skip -Werror=strict-prototypes only on broken icu 4.2 - 4.9. #867
    - Documentation
        + Document .lex "name" limitations. Use .lex 'name' w/ single-quotes #1095
        + Fixed 6.9 manpage regressions on BSD make #1125
        + Better newclass example code in pirbook #802
    - Tests
        + Fixed make smoke, uploading to smolder with changed YAML::Tiny
          quoting. #1078
        + Add better GC stress tests with reproducible GC bugs. #1108
    - Community

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

e90e83b69ec2f6c54bb0c6dc5645159c044bb3a48618e88e858dd18234ed1e84 parrot-6.10.0.tar.gz
a2c1a94ae73be57c3f26d97901edfffea5fc65e0df270863477465b9f301eba0 parrot-6.10.0.tar.bz2

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next scheduled release is at 16 Dec 2014.

Enjoy!

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