Submitted by chromatic on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 00:16

The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far down that the beings on the surface — superior though they are — can't effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with points we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place.

— Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 2.0.0 "Inevitable." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 2.0.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 2.0.0 News:

Features Context PMCs now support attribute-based introspection Context and CallSignature PMCs merged into CallContext .lex directive throws exceptions when used with incorrect register types

Platforms Packaging improved for free OS distributions PPC, PPC64, and ARM now tested when running Linux

Performance Minor improvements to the profiling runcore Improvements from the CallContext PMC merge

New deprecations In/out parameters in STRING modification functions Void handling in NCI signatures Parameter passing opcodes order in PBC

Tests Continued migration of core tests from Perl 5 to PIR

Tools dependency checker improved

Miscellaneous Deprecation cycle length changed to three months from six GC accuracy improved PMC freeze improvements; much more reliable Makefile improvements for dependency handling



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

for supporting this project. Our next release is 16 February 2010.

Enjoy!