On 21 February 2008, Patrick R. Michaud released Parrot 0.5.3. Read on for the Parrot 0.5.3 release announcement or download Parrot 0.5.3 from CPAN.
On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.5.3 "Way of the Parrot" Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.
Parrot 0.5.3 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.
Parrot 0.5.3 Highlights:
The Perl 6 on Parrot compiler has now been given the name "Rakudo Perl". More details on the new name are available from http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/35400. In addition, Rakudo now has more support for objects, classes, roles, etc., and a better interface to the official Perl 6 test suite.
More languages are being converted to use the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.
Parrot 0.5.3 News:
- Documentation + PDD09 (garbage collection) - approved + PDD28 (character sets) - draft started + added function documentation to some core functions + PCT beginners guide, optable guide and PAST nodes guide, bug fixes - Compilers + IMCC: plugged various memory leaks and other cleanups + PCT: . add "attribute" as a scope variant to PAST::Var nodes . add 'shift' and 'pop' methods to PAST:: nodes + NQP: add '=:=' op, tests for scalar and list contextualizers, \x escapes - Languages + APL: reimplementation with PCT + Cardinal (Ruby): reimplemention with PCT + Ecmascript: reimplementation with PCT + lolcode: improved expression parsing, ifthen, IT, YARN + lua: . aligned with Lua official release 5.1.3. . added initial PCT-based implementation. + Punie (Perl 1): refactor to use standard PCT-based filenames + Pynie (Python): add functions + Rakudo (Perl 6): . rebranded, formerly known as 'perl6' . passes many more official Perl 6 Specification tests . added 'perl6doc' utility . oo including meta?classes, objects, methods, attributes, role composition . match variables, while/until statements, traits . many new methods for Str, List, Hash, Junction - Implementation - Deprecations + PCCINVOKE syntax for named arguments using []; use () instead. + see DEPRECATED.pod for details - Miscellaneous + pbc_to_exe refactored for code reduction, portability, and maintainability + various bug fixes + #line directives added to generated JIT files, improving debugging + consting, attribute marking, refactoring, warnings cleanup
The next scheduled Parrot release will be on March 18, 2008.
Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project.
Enjoy!