Parrot 0.5.2 released, now with "make perl6"

Bob Rogers, Parrot release manager for Parrot 0.5.2, announces...

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.5.2 "P.e. nipalensis." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.5.2 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on the source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 0.5.2 Highlights:

• "make perl6" uses the new pbc_to_exe tool to build a Perl 6 executable. It's still a ways from being a finished implementation of Perl 6, but we're working on that. Come join us!
• Parrot now has a LOLCODE implementation! Not an "enterprise-class" computing language, you say? We don't expect anyone to use it for their next app, but at less than 500 lines of source code (and most of that in a subset of Perl 6), it demonstrates the power of the Parrot Compiler Toolkit. See lolcode.com for more.

Parrot 0.5.2 News

- Documentation
 + PDD27 (multiple dispatch) - debut of new design
 + Numerous small updates to glossary.pod, etc
- Compiler Toolkit
 + NQP: optional, named, and named/required parameters
 + PIRC: cleanups
 + PAST: "defined-or"
- Languages
 + New mk_language_shell.pl script creates language stubs
 + LOLCODE: new
 + Lua: various
 + Eclectus: start with support for local variables and procedures,
   use SXML as intermediate representation
 + Perl 6: list builtins, compiler directives, command-line options, etc.
 + "make perl6" now builds a Perl 6 executable
 + punie: more builtins, control structures, code refactoring
 + pynie: builtin stubs, more tests
- Implementation
 + New "pbc_to_exe" utility turns bytecode to executables
 + New set_outer method for subs
 + Further configuration refactoring for testability
 + All functions now completely headerized
 + Concurrency: interpreter schedulers
- Deprecations
 + DYNSELF (changes to SELF; SELF to STATICSELF)
 + METHOD (replaced by renaming PCCMETHOD)
 + pmcinfo op (superseded by 'inspect')
 + get_attr, set_attr, and 8 other vtable methods
 + See DEPRECATED.pod for details
- Miscellaneous
 + Many bug fixes
 + Minor speed enhancements with UTF-8 string handling
 + Debian packaging
 + consting, attribute marking, warnings cleanup, memory leaks plugged ...

The next scheduled Parrot release will be five weeks from today, on 19 February 2008.

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