Parrot 0.0.9 status

[Steve Fink]

The basic status is that lots of people, many of them coincidentally
named Leopold Toetsch, have been fixing zillions of things and
implementing a number of new features. Nearly everything needed for
0.0.9 has happened, and a lot else besides.

I personally have been busy with my day job, shipping one unit and
making a release for the software that goes on it -- in that order,
with a week between. Release when ready, ship when needed. I'll be on
vacation next week, which means I'll have much more time to spend on
Parrot, but much less connectivity.

There are still a couple of things needed for this release:

1. The tinderbox is a solid sheet of orange flame. No release until
it's all green. The current problems appear to be: legitimate bugs
that don't show up on my platform, known PPC problems in varargs code,
and an incorrect tar file being used by all the TD-* machines.

2. Warnings. Still too many for comfort. I'll probably get a chance to
look at some of these on a different platform soon, but I don't have
access to anything very interesting.

3. The previously mentioned varargs/sprintf* PPC problem.

On the bright side, these are the major pieces that have been
completed out of my original 0.0.9 list:

* JIT trace/restart (Leo)
* Patch backlog (it fits on a screen now!)
* Bytecode format (well, we're a little further along, anyway)

And we have some fairly major new features:

* lexicals (J Sillito)
* stabs support for JIT (Leo)
* memory leak cleanups (Leo)