Squeak 4.2 final now out! 3 February, 2011

Squeak4.2-10966.zip is now available at http://ftp.squeak.org/4.2. This is intended to be the actual-released 4.2 image, unless, as Chris Muller says, “we find some problem, which we won’t!”.

Some of the new features in this release are:

Preparation for adoption of Cog VM

Significant class-library and IDE improvements, with many speed improvements

High-precision Clock (microsecond precision)

Cleaned-up code base, with better support for unloading optional packages and fonts.

The last of the underscore assignments have been replaced with ANSI assignments.

Refactoring and unification of Smalltalk and SmalltalkImage globals.

API for stdio access (requires recent VM)

Improved command-line interface

Better Documentation (see Help > Help Browser )

) SUnit now supports timeouts

More UI work including a tweaked look and feel, and support for translucent fonts

Support for classic MVC has been restored to Squeak for better support of slower devices

System Reporter (found under Help > About this system) – a tool to simplify and standardise the reporting of your image’s set-up.

See Help > Welcome Workspaces > Welcome to Squeak 4.2 for more details of the changes in this image.

Note that users on Macs may find that the mouse buttons work in an unexpected order in this image. This is expected behaviour to allow for the grand reunification of mouse button handling in the upcoming version of the VM, which will restore the standard behaviour. In the meantime, use the Swap Mouse Buttons preference to keep things sane.

Congratulations to Chris Muller who has been leading the effort to get this release out the door, as well as the many contributors who provided updates, error checking, bug fixes and moral support for the process.