PLNews: Programming Language News

Rakudo Perl #24 has been released. Rakudo is a Perl 6 implementation for Parrot.

This release includes: support for passing 86.1% of the available spectest test suite, improvements to the Rat type and related math functions, and other changes.

Rakudo Perl 6 Development Release #23 has been released. Rakudo is a Perl 6 implementation for Parrot.

This release includes: support for passing 85.5% of the available spectest test suite; support for the unpacking of arrays, hashes and objects in signatures; performance improvements; and other changes.

Parrot 1.8.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: experimental support for overriding VTABLE invoke in PIR objects, a reworking of the PCC internals, improvements to the fixed-size allocator, the addition of experimental 'fetch' and 'vivify' ops, a new self-hosting implementation of NQP, the use of shared libraries on NetBSD, RTEMS fixes, speed improvements, deprecations, bug fixes, and other changes.

Rakudo Perl 6 Development Release #22 has been released. Rakudo is a Perl 6 implementation for Parrot.

This release includes: support for passing 85% of the available spectest test suite, the implementation of complex numbers as a Perl 6 class, a new signature binder, improved signature introspection, better errors relating to signatures, support for signature literals, support for accessing outer lexical variables from classes and packages, new variants of the series operator, and other changes.

Parrot 1.7.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: performance improvements, improved Parrot debugger documentation, increased use of the Parrot STRING API, the removal of the JIT subsystem, improved line number tracking in IMCC, and other changes.

Parrot 1.5.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: the removal of several deprecated functions and features, debugger improvements, the addition of an experimental fixed-size structure allocator and lazy arena allocation to the GC, optimizations, documentation updates, and other changes.

Parrot 1.4.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: Key and Iterator refactoring, faster code generated by pbc_to_exe, NCI optimizations, support for building on Win64, garbage collector improvements, documentation updates, experimental OpenGL bindings and library, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 1.3.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: IO system optimizations, fixes to the inheritance hierarchy of FileHandle and Socket PMC types, a cleanup and refactoring of the GC internals, PMC class manipulations that use type numbers instead of string names, memory leak fixes, the addition of the root_new opcode, documentation updates, updates to the OpenGL library, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 1.1.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: the addition of load_language and find_caller_lex ops, socket IO back as PMC, refactoring of Hash and ManagedStruct, a greedy-only version of the ** quantifier, support for HLL source line bytecode annotations, the removal of deprecated ops and other features, documentation updates, Debian/Ubuntu package improvements, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 1.0.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: documentation updates; the separation of the Pynie, Cardinal and APL language implementations; the removal of the deprecated Tqueue and Closure PMCs; and other changes.

Parrot 0.9.1 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: support for portable Inf, NaN, and -0.0; a new experimental BigNum implementation; Pair as a dynamic loadable PMC; the removal of the SArray PMC; documentation updates; improvements to the IMCC compiler; improvements to the PHP and ECMAScript language implementations; the separation of the Lua, Rakudo, lazy-k, unlambda and WMLScript implementations; the removal of the Zcode implementation; bug fixes; and other changes.

Parrot 0.8.2 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: the addition of the 'capture_lex' opcode; automatic resume for nonfatal exceptions; the addition of multidispatch caching support; performance improvements; improvements to the IMCC, PCT, PGE and PIRC compilers; improvements to the Rakudo, Lua, Pipp and Ecmascript language implementations; bug fixes; and other changes.

Parrot 0.8.1 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: the removal of the pseudo PIR opcode 'addr', the addition of the 'box' opcode, the use of .tailcall instead of .return for tailcalls, improved debugging support, the JIT compilation of NCI signatures on x86-32, updates to the Perl 6 and Ruby language implementations, documentation updates, improvements to the OpenGL bindings, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 0.8.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: the expansion of float precision from 6 significant digits to 15, the auto-promotion of large integers in PIR to avoid precision loss, improved precision of complex square root, support for exception handlers registering the types of exceptions they catch, updates to the Cardinal implementation of Ruby, updates to the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6, new and updated examples, documentation updates, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 0.7.1 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: preliminary support for resumable exceptions, updates to the Rakudo (Perl 6) and Cardinal (Ruby) language implementations, documentation updates and cleanups, and other changes.

Parrot 0.6.3 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: improvements to the Cardinal, Chitchat, Pheme, Pynie, Rakudo, Squak and Tcl language implementations; the addition of a NQP 'return' statement and ?? !! ternary operator; documentation updates; bug fixes; and other changes.

Parrot 0.6.2 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: updates to the pdd28_strings.pod and pdd19_pir.pod specifications, the removal of user stack opcodes, simplified ops control flow syntax, the implementation of Rational PMC, the retiring of the Amber language implementation, updates to a number of the language implementations, optimizations and performance improvements, and other changes.

Parrot 0.6.1 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: an independent C pre-processor for the C99 implementation, the reimplementation of the HQ9+ and Lua implementations with PCT, updates to the Rakudo implementation, performance improvements, and other changes.

Parrot 0.6.0 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: an updated PMC implementation; a cleanup of the IMCC documentation; updates and improvements to the C99, lolcode, Rakudo Lua, Cardinal, Pheme, EcmaScript, Tcl, Eclectus and WMLScript implementations; other changes and bug fixes.

Parrot 0.5.3 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: documentation updates, IMCC memory leak fixes and cleanups, the reimplementation of some language implementations using PCT, the rebranding of the 'perl6' language implementation to Rakudo, plus other bug fixes and changes.

Parrot 0.5.2 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: a LOLCODE language implementation, the new pbc_to_exe utility for turning bytecode into executables, 'make perl6' for building a Perl 6 executable, documentation updates, faster UTF-8 string handling, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 0.5.1 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: documentation updates; a redesign of the Parrot Compiler Toolkit; NQP updates; the reimplementation of the perl6, abc, punie and pynie language implementations using PCT and NQP; new 'die', 'addhandler' and 'copy' opcodes; bug fixes; dead code removal; and other changes.

Parrot 0.4.17 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: performance improvements, a working -r flag, updates to the pmc2c and PIR syntaxes, documentation updates, language implementation improvements and updates, code cleanups, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 0.4.16 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: Kea Common Lisp, NQP improvements, a code review on every PMC, bug fixes, and other changes.

Parrot 0.4.15 has been released. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently execute dynamic languages.

This release includes: the addition of NQP (a Perl 6-like language), initial work on a JIT engine for 64-bit processors, code cleanups, bug fixes, and other changes.