Parrot 1.3.0 "Andean Swift"

I put out the 1.3.0 release earlier this afternoon, here's the release announcement:

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.3.0 "Andean Swift." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 1.3.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 1.3.0 News:

- Core
+ Optimized parts of the IO system
+ Fixed inheritance hierarchy of FileHandle and Socket PMC types
+ Fixed leaks involving subroutines and Parrot_Context
+ Cleaned up and refactored GC internals, including fixes and optimizations
+ Optimized PMC class manipulations to use type numbers instead of string names
+ Fixed problems involving hashval calculations in strings
+ Removed unnecessary MULTI dispatches in built-in PMCs
+ Fixed memory leaks involving PMCs that were not properly destroyed
+ Fixed creation of PMCProxy PMCs in correct namespaces
+ Added preliminary Pipe support
+ Fixed cloning of Object PMCs
+ Added root_new opcode
+ Added initial versions of Packfile PMCs with read/write capabilities
- Compilers
+ Fixed several memory leaks in IMCC
+ Updated PCT to use root_new opcode
+ Added support for keyword "self" in NQP
- Documentation
+ Improved and expanded /docs/book
+ Updated project documentation
+ Defined 'experimental' status and procedures in DEPRECATED.pod
- Miscellaneous
+ Cleaned code and improved code-level documentation
+ Various bugfixes, code cleanups, and coding standard fixes
+ Added an experimental compiler library to help use PIR libraries from HLLs
+ Updated OpenGL library and examples to support experimental HLL import

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next release is 21 July 2009.

Enjoy!

I picked the name "Andean Swift" to pay homage to the serious optimization work we've done this month. I wanted a fast bird, and naturally I thought of using "Peregrine Falcon" first. However, considering chromatic's awesome work in plugging memory leaks, I thought it would be more fitting to pick a bird that was both fast and small. We can reserve "peregrine falcon" for a future optimized Parrot par excellence. Maybe that will be the one where we introduce the super-fast L1 operations, or a faster concurrent GC, or something else extraordinary.