Announcing Kind 2 1.6.0

[kind2-announce]

Dear all,

We are happy to announce the new official release (v1.6.0) of Kind 2,
an open-source, multi-engine, SMT-based automatic model checker for
safety properties of Lustre programs [1].

In addition to several improvements and bug fixes, this release includes
a new implementation of Kind 2's language front-end with:

- Support for forward references to nodes and modes in contracts.
- Individual namespaces for imported contracts.
- Enhanced type checking of composite data types.

Although we strongly encourage users to use the new front-end,
the old front-end can still be enabled for now by passing
`--old_frontend true` to Kind 2.

Please refer to the CHANGES document [2] for a more detailed
description, and to the user's documentation [3] for further details.

The latest version of Kind 2 can be downloaded from
https://github.com/kind2-mc/kind2/releases and is distributed in
source form, as well as binaries for both Linux and macOS.
It can also be installed through OPAM.

Feedback and feature requests are most welcome. Please contact the
developers or open an issue directly on Github at
https://github.com/kind2-mc/kind2/issues/new

If you want to participate in discussions with developers and other
users of Kind 2, you are encouraged to join the kind2-users group at
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/kind2-users

Best,

The Kind 2 Development Team

[1] http://kind.cs.uiowa.edu
[2] https://github.com/kind2-mc/kind2/blob/v1.6.0/CHANGES.md
[3] https://kind.cs.uiowa.edu/kind2_user_doc/