I posted the release notice for the 0.8.2 Parrot here on Tuesday, and I'm proud to report that the release went off without too much trouble. There were a few issues that arose because we've been moving and changing all the Parrot infrastructure to new servers and new software, so in many ways I was the guinea pig for that. But, since I've never done a release before, it's not like I was expecting it to go any way besides how it went.
Allison created the pdd09gc_part1 branch today to take the first baby steps in replacing the ailing mark&sweep collector. The plan for this branch is to take a paired down version of the incremental tricolor collector I wrote over the summer and get it working, without all the troublesome frills that I had tried to add back then. Once we get a basic version working as a drop-in replacement for the current collector, we can start tackling some of the more ambitious ideas that we've been thinking about for the past few months.
The calling_conventions branch is still in limbo, and Allison created a cc_restart branch to try and incrementally fold in the changes that I had made there to help with the debugging effort. The error we're getting is so amazingly difficult to debug, and I have a feeling that it's connected to some of the other problems people have been uncovering recently with contexts and subroutines. Time will tell, but I can say that the whole subroutine calling mechanism we have now is very fragile and needs major improvements.
These are just the things I'm working on this month, come 2009 I have a bunch of other projects I want to tackle: Improve the C99 language implementation, write that Octave implementation I started working on idly last summer, and I've also had my eye on Parrot's asynchronous I/O system. I know the asynch I/O system isn't slated to be included until 2.0 in 2010, but I think I want to take a stab at it long before that.
2009 is going to be a great year for Parrot, and I'm looking forward to all the cool things I'm going to try to do with it.
