[ANN] Slate 0.1 Released!

[Brian T Rice]

Here it is, everyone! A first official release. It's not perfect, but it's
0.1, and I'm tired of fiddling with it.

There are some issues with the binaries we've posted, so I'm mostly
recommending that people use another CL besides ECL if they want to really
experiment with Slate.

Anyway, here is the big overview included in NEWS in the archives:

- An initial named release of Slate, with an included documented build
  procedure for producing stand-alone executables (and loadable binary
  libraries out of Slate sources).
- Slate's implementation is still based upon Common Lisp, although it
  performs some compilation, so has acceptable performance for basic
  testing and evaluation.
- The current libraries include file access, extensive collection and
  stream support, and many other basic libraries.
- There is no support yet for concurrency or system event-handling.
- The manual covers all language features and issues in sufficient detail
  now for beginners to grasp, and covers all libraries which are not subject
  to design changes.
- The graphics / interface architecture is included in outline form, but
  is not yet functional.
- The bootstrap process is incomplete, but in a presentable state so that
  you can see the intended run-time architecture and optimizations.

I've put up an entry on the Freshmeat site for Slate, under:
http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/slatesmalltalk/

so that people can track it without being involved on the mailing list.

Our home page, http://slate.tunes.org/ now has links to the 3 different
package types available. All of them include full sources, and an HTML
copy of the online manual under doc/manual/.

For the developers, CVS now has a branch tag of "rel-0-1" to which some
basic fixes can be applied, but mostly I want to focus on the next steps
of development, getting the compiler working and demonstrating some basic
functionality for socket interaction and graphics.

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