New faster release Parrot 6.11.0 "Fischer's Lovebird"

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 6.11.0, also known as "Fischer's Lovebird". Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 6.11.0 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

Highlights: Performance: 15-25% faster, fixed GC, experimental VMS port.

Parrot 6.11.0 News:

    - Core
        + Rewrote ResizablePMCArray with moving offset, esp on shift.
          Even better than nqp/qrpa. 20% faster overall. #1152
        + Fixed wrong maybe_mark_and_sweep call in --gc ms #1142
        + Added GC maybe_gc_mark vtable function #1142
        + Fixed Memory_Block prolog access in --gc inf #1136
        + Added MEMORY_DEBUG tracing to --gc inf and ms2, added
          GC validation to ms2.
        + Fix bignum.i_substract and i_multiply #1144
        + Fix cmod_p_p_n* math dynops for NaN and Inf #1147
        + Fix floor, ceil and complex, integer math ops for NaN and Inf #422
        + Optimize printing of single numbers #828
        + More --debugging protections when accessing empty registers
          from :immediate #1024
        + Change ResizablePMCArray.delete to throw out of bounds errors,
          but just warn on deprecated delete[0] with size 0 for backcompat. #1153
        + Add check for illegal delete of capture blocks in PGE.match #1154
        + Add new traceflag -t20 for ResizablePMCArray states.
        + Add experimental vms support by mvorl. Untested. GH #866
        + Provide Parrot_new_string and Parrot_compile_string in the extend api
    - Build
        + Extend auto::infnan probe to other --floatval #1146
        + Warn in Configure on experimental flags intval, floatval and gc #1148
        + Die in Configure on unsupported intval sizes #1148, #642, ...
        + Renamed auto::labs to auto::mathl, probe and use more long math
          functions: fabsl powl ceill floorl fmodl expl logl #1111
        + Fixed pbc_to_exe and wrong Parrot_{g,s,uns}etenv declarations on windows #1156
    - Documentation
        + Rewrote docs/pmc/array.pod
    - Tests
        + Fix t/steps/auto/arch-01.t darwin regression #1142
        + Added bigger t/stress/gc.t test to catch most GC issues.
        + Add optional copyright year test on TEST_SLOW #719
        + Fix most --floatval='long double' tests, just embed API broken #1111
        + Adjust tests for VALGRIND=valgrind #1150
        + Added tests to t/pmc/resizablepmcarray.t to cover all offset cases. #1152
        + Replace included IO::CaptureOutput with our own capture function. #892
        + Fixed most embed and extend tests. #41511 #829
    - Community

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-git

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

e92829ff3796f834ac98f100ca5625850590574822ca479c13c00f622f1c322f parrot-6.11.0.tar.gz
e3ab352ed853a568216948b5864edf2ce9aa7af888f58dd173eaec04c08260ba parrot-6.11.0.tar.bz2

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next scheduled release is at 20 Jan 2015.

Enjoy!

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