Parrot 0.6.1 "Bird of Paradise" Released

[particle]

Aloha!

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.1 "Bird of Paradise." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.6.1 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 0.6.1 News:

- Specification
  + drafted pdd29_compiler_tools.pod
  + updated pdd28_character_sets.pod draft
  + updated pdd19_pir.pod draft
- Languages
  + c99: added independent C pre-processor
  + HQ9+: reimplemented with PCT
  + Lua:
    . reimplementation with PCT, using PAST and POST
    . behavior aligned wih 5.1.3
  + Rakudo:
    . implemented basic I/O, including '$*IN', '$*OUT', '$*ERR', 'prefix:='
    . implemented simple typing and runtime type checking
    . added basic multi-method dispatch
    . expanded named argument handling, including Pair and colonpairs
    . added 'Whatever' and 'Capture' classes
    . implemented 'handles' trait verb
    . added 'loop' statement
    . implemented 'given', 'when', 'for', 'while', 'until' statement modifiers
    . implemented Hash methods '.keys' and '.values'
    . fixed bug to get '.WHAT' working correctly
    . initial implementation of 'eval'
- Compilers
  + NQP:
    . created a bootstrapped build, see 'make boot'
    . added 'infix:<', 'infix:<=', 'infix:>', 'infix:>=' relational operators
    . added 'postfix:++', 'postfix:--' operators
  + PCT:
    . added methods specifying default behaviors in PAST, reducing repeated code
    . improved symbol table lookup
  + PGE:
    . removed deprecated code including: P6Regex, P6Grammar, PAST-pm
- Miscellaneous
  + notable speedups during compilation and execution of parrot and HLLs
  + pdb (the parrot debugger) can now catch parrot exceptions
  + better detection of glibc and gettext during configuration
  + various bugfixes, code cleanups, deprecations, and coding standard fixes

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

Enjoy!

[dragonchild]

First off, congrats to everyone whose doing this amazing work.

But, I have to know - who makes the names and can we bottle that?!

[Anonymous Monk]

Would be nice if the 'perl6 -V' output was parsable by perlbench or perlbench were hacked to work with the existing output.

[chromatic]

What would you like to see from it?