Parrot 1.5.0 "TEH PARROTZ!" Released!

I released Parrot 1.5.0 a few moments ago. Here's the release announcement:

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.5.0 "TEH PARROTZ!." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 1.5.0 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 1.5.0 News:

- Core
  + Removed several deprecated functions and features
  + Removed bsr, jsr, branch_cs, and ret opcodes
  + Removed global stacks system
  + Changed OPS file format to include explicit preamble
  + Changed all "new 'Iterator'" instructions into 'iter' instructions
  + Removed Configure.pl options for specifying non-working GC cores
  + Removed unexecuting code as found by Coverity
  + Improvements to the Parrot Debugger
  + Added experimental fixed-size structure allocator to the GC
  + Added experimental lazy arena allocation to the GC
  + Removed the defunct PASM1 compiler object
  + Refactored hashes, keys, and iterators
  + Added "corevm" make target to build Parrot without all the supporting libraries
  + Removed Random PMC type and added in a "rand" dynop
  + Optimization and Improvements to the NCI thunk generator
  + New include file libpaths.pasm
- Compilers
  + Multiple .local with same name and different type is now an error on IMCC.
- Platforms
  + Improved support for detecting Fink and Macports
  + Updated search directories for libraries
- Documentation
  + "Parrot Developers Guide: PIR" released to publisher and available to purchase
  + Improved documentation about Parrot Debugger
  + Update PGE Documentation
- Miscellaneous
  + Added tests
  + Fixes to code, documentation, and standards

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project. Our next release is 15 September 2009.

"TEH PARROTZ!" is a name that I've been wanting to use for a while. It pays nice homage to a popular internet meme and shows that we're having fun and that development isn't always SRS BIZNS!!



It can be a lot of fun, especially as more new people are getting involved. And with the release out of the way, we can get back to some serious development.