Updates

[Brian Rice]

Hi all,

So, after many weeks, my contract job is over and not soon enough.  
I've been neglecting Slate, but it was a busy project and I gained a  
lot of embedded systems experience, so I think it was rewarding.

Some updates since there last was activity:
- The make install target was re-instated. There is still the problem  
that the image needs to start up in the source directory. I have part  
of a general facility working to fix this.
- Nick Forde added many benchmark tests from the Computer Language  
Shootout. "make benchmark" runs them. Verdict: The Slate VM is quite  
fast; the Slate image, incredibly slow (due to huge layers of message- 
passing overhead - we have a lot more library abstraction than other  
systems, supposed to be elided by dynamic inlining later).
- Bug-fixes for queues, ring buffers, and various other bits.

I am going to crank out a new version soon to get all of the  
interesting changes out into the wild so I can focus on bigger  
features that we really need to move forward - more on that later.

--
-Brian