[ANN] Slate Release 0.2.1

[Brian T Rice]

As promised, Slate's newest sub-point release is a monthly update.

There are a lot of incremental changes and bug-fixes, which is the main
reason to get this. Also, I've added optimization settings to the top of
each file which makes the interpreter run faster; quite a bit faster on
some optimizing compilers (e.g. CMUCL, SBCL, OpenMCL run it basically at
python speed).

The main site will have a notice and download entry for
http://slate.tunes.org/downloads/slate-0.2.1.tgz shortly.

The NEWS file has the specifics of the updates:

http://slate.tunes.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/slate/NEWS?rev=HEAD&only_with_tag=REL-0-2-1&content-type=text/plain

Mostly what has taken place is that every single library has been loaded
and tested for basic functionality, except for obviously incomplete ones
such as the XML library and parser-generator / regexp combination.
Notably, the File libraries had some odd problems that had to be fixed
with a reworking of the primitive-library interface. One result is that
the newForInput: etc. constructors are now replaced by openForInput: and
so on. But overall the facilities are really usable now, so Real Work is
possible.

The graphics libraries are now fully functional and tested; Douglas
Brebner's demonstrations show how to use them (not included yet; see his
website: http://www.fang.demon.co.uk/Slate/). He's continuing to expand
the capabilities in that direction, which is pretty exciting. He's been
putting to work a lot of the libraries to make this happen, so many bugs
have been discovered and fixed as a result.

The C translator is not quite functional yet. Mostly there are a lot of
pieces of it which can handle fragments and produce valid output, but the
large scale organization is still incomplete. On the other hand, you can
see the heap and GC code and many of the primitives implemented in
src/mobius/vm/ and the organization seems to be working out decently. What
I'll try to focus on for 0.2.2 will include finishing the translator, the
bytecode compiler, and a basic image-file-writer so that the remaining
development can focus on the VM itself, and all the little details
involved with linking it in to platform API's and producing a running
system.

Anyway, the release is New and Improved, so enjoy it! :-)

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/