Parrot 1.9.0

Parrot 1.9.0 "Blue-Fronted Amazon" was released yesterday, courtesy of Gerd Pokorra. As always, Parrot showed up on time and under budget, a rarity in the software world. This is the last development release before the big 2.0 milestone on 19 January 2010. chromatic will be the release manager for 2.0, followed by darbelo (2.1, 16 Feb) and then cotto (2.2, 16 March). Probably around January I will put out a call for release managers in April and May too.

1.9.0 was a relatively conservative release in terms of entries in the changelog. Comparing the release announcement for the past month doesn't show the same number of high-profile projects that previous months had. Part of the reason for this is the ongoing focus on testing and optimization. These things are great for the project but tend not to pad the changelog too much. I also think that many of our core developers are starting to focus energy on other ecosystem-related projects: compilers, libraries, and utilities. After all, Parrot is an interesting project by itself but all the various projects that it enables are even more so, which is a major draw for our developers. Success begets success, so the rapid proliferation of these side projects are just as important to the overall success of Parrot as a whole.

I expect 2.0 to be similarly conservative with much of the development team focusing on fixing bugs, improving documentation, and expanding test coverage. There are some big changes brewing that could land before 2.0, however, so it might turn out to be a big release indeed.