[Ann] ECAP 2 Pre-release available for download! (New JIT, HiDPI support, One IMAP Client to Rule Them All and Much More!)

[Seth Berman]

Hello All,

Instantiations Early Customer Access Program (ECAP).

Instantiations is pleased to announce this incredible preview that is the culmination of over 1.5 years worth

of hard work from our team members.

Making its debut is a brand new Just-In-Time Compiler which brings tremendous performance gains to our 9.x virtual machines.

A special thank you to ETAS GmbH who partnered with Instantiations to help make this JIT project a reality.

Also included is Full HiDPI support for VA Smalltalk on Windows.  VA Smalltalk provides both native (OS-drawn) and

emulated (Smalltalk-drawn) widgets that are actively in use by our many customers. As a modern Smalltalk, we felt it was

important to ensure the various drawing layers and widgets were able to support HiDPI modes and requests for this has

been growing.

A brand new IMAP client that implements over 20 RFCs and supports advanced features like SSL/TLS, Compression

IDLE (aka Server Push), SASL-IR, ESEARCH, Sort/Thread, ACL, Enable, Namespaces, Quotas, non-synchronized literals
MOVE, UIDPLUS, and more is now available. Documentation and examples will be coming for the official release.

This is one of the most comprehensive and powerful IMAP Clients you will find available in any language!

Incorporated in this ECAP is a set of 100+ enhancements and fixes.

There is a _CHANGELOG.txt that you can always refer to for a list of changes in the downloaded ECAP directory.
However, I usually like to highlight some of the changes here for all to see what we have been doing.

Below are some  areas of change in ECAP Build 433:

See here if you would like to review all great changes already mentioned for ECAP 1

Core

- Walkback generator provides more useful information and pluggability

Compression

- Brotli compression integrated into Unified Compression Streams framework (EsCompressionStreamsApp)

- ZStandard compression integrated into Unified Compression Streams framework (EsCompressionStreamsApp)

STON (Smalltalk Object Notation)

- New STON features and tests! (thanks to Sven Van Caekenberghe for this high-quality project)

VA Smalltalk IOT - VAST on ARM

- Updated to use our latest ARM-based virtual machine

- VM now supports Aarch64/ARM64 (to be shipped in next ECAP)

- Testing with 1-Wire, I2C and SPI protocols and new sensors

- Passes VAST product Test Suite (>15k tests)

Unicode/CodePages

- ZipStreams supports UTF-8 encoded filenames

Graphics:

- Scintilla Editor fonts use DirectWrite (GPU-Accelerated rendering) by default

It probably goes without saying that 9.2 is shaping up to be one very cool release!

- Seth

[Louis LaBrunda]

Sounds like a very cool release indeed!!!

Lou

[Wayne Johnston]

I tried this ECAP, just enough to get a feel that indeed the slowdown we noticed when going to 9.1.1 is gone.  Thanks!

Any updates beyond saying the official 9.2 should be out in Q3?

Thanks!

[Seth Berman]

Hi Wayne,

Glad to hear.  Probably late Q3/early Q4 at the moment.

Code cut-off is beginning of Sept, so testing will bring it around that timeframe.

- Seth