VERSION 0.0.5

New in 0.0.5

- Full GC
- Perl Scalar support in PMCs
- Array and Hash types almost ready for prime-time
- Internal support for keyed types
- EMACS editing mode
- New PDDs
- New Language - BASIC
- Regular expression compiler
- More tests
- Many, many bug fixes, enhancements, and speedups

New in 0.0.4

- Arena-based memory allocation system
- Copying GC
- New IO subsystem
- "Predereferencing" mode - ./parrot -P - 22% speedup
- JIT compiler - ./parrot -j
- Parrot now builds warnings-clean on many platforms
- Many more PMC methods implemented
- Regular expression operations
- Added a FAQ
- Basic support for embedding Parrot in other programs
- Warnings support
- Added PDDs to distribution
- Bignum library

- PMC inheritance
- Added an assembly optimizer
- Improved string encoding/type support
- Many more tests
- Source reformatting
- Major refactoring in packfile library
- More Miniperl functionality
- New PMC "clone" operator
- Beginnings of key-based access to PMCs - arrays and hashes
- MOPS comparisons in examples/mops/

New in 0.0.3

- PMCs!
- Perl base scalar types implemented
- A new minilanguage, Scheme
- Much improved documentation
- Register stacks pushing and popping
- User stack pushing, popping and rotating
- Jako updates: subroutines, more example programs, optimizations
- test_prog renamed to 'parrot'

- Added fatures to the assembler: @ for current location, and global
  labels
- Build tweaks for VMS
- Bytecode typing clean-ups
- More platforms: OS X, HPUX, OS/2
- The proliferation of runops cores reduced to one fast and one slow one
- Opcode tracing, bounds checking, profiling
- Vastly improved string support, with separation of encoding and
  charset
- Lots more tests
- Multiple interpreter creation support - the beginnings of threading
- Much better resource handling - the beginnings of GC

New in 0.0.2

- Parrot now works on all core platforms
- A large number of tests, in the standard Perl testing framework
- A new minilanguage (Jako) which compiles to Parrot assembly
- Documentation about the assembly language (docs/parrot_assembly.pod)

- Separate modules for assembly (Parrot::Assemble) and bytecode
  manipulation (Parrot::PackFile::*, packfile.c)
- Assembler completely rewritten
- Better operand-type guessing in the assembler
- Assembler support for '\n' etc. in string constants
- Code reformatted to match the coding standards
- New ops for register-constant INTEGER comparisons
- Macro expansion in the assembler
- IVs and NVs renamed to more friendly INTVAL and NUMVAL
- Hard-coded pack("") formats removed
- Better handling of floating-point numbers in assembler
- Moved floats to constant table (fixing many alignment issues)
