All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Parrot 0.5.1

brian_d_foy on 2007-12-18T22:21:00

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.5.1 "Hatachi." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.5.1 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 0.5.1 News:

  • Documentation
    • PDD19 (PIR) - reflect state on the ground; incorporate old IMCC docs
    • PDD25 (Concurrency) - launch out of draft
    • Improve documentation of deprecated parrot features.
  • Compilers
    • PCT: Parrot Compiler Toolkit redesigned and updated
    • NQP: major updates, including support for namespaces, module/class declarations, methods
    • IMCC: remove .sym as alias for .local. Remove .pcc_ prefix for calling directives (.pcc_begin became .begin_call).
    • PIRC: creates an AST during the parse.
    • PGE: more updates to match S05 syntax.
  • Languages
    • perl6: re-implemented using PCT and NQP, new object subsystem
    • abc: re-implemented using PCT and NQP
    • eclectus: initial implementation
    • plumhead: add PCT variant
    • punie: re-implemented using PCT and NQP, extended to handle subroutines Happy 20th Birthday, Perl!
    • pynie: re-implemented using PCT and NQP
    • PIR: start conversion to NQP (under construction)
  • Implementation
    • new opcodes: 'die', 'addhandler', 'copy'
    • Initial implementation of Concurrency PDD
    • Add 'arity' method to Sub and NCI PMCs
  • Miscellaneous
    • Bug cleanup
    • consting, attribute marking, warnings cleanup, memory leaks, GC...
    • dead code removal (includes some defunct languages)

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project.

Enjoy!