[Mono-list] Nemerle 0.9.0 is out

[Michal Moskal]

Nemerle 0.9.0 has just been released. You can find details in the blog
post:
  http://nemerle.org/blog/archive/2005/Sep-14.html

Below you'll find an overview.

C# 4.0 today!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You read about C# 3.0 and are willing to see how could C# 4.0 look
like? More powerful type inference? AST manipulation raised to its
limits? Full generics support? Try Nemerle!


In general
~~~~~~~~~~

The biggest change in this version is switch to the .NET 2.0
assemblies. The compiler now generates code using runtime generics
when parametric polymorphism is used in Nemerle. While the language
was designed with this switch in mind since the very beginning, the
constantly changing and/or incomplete specifications forced us to make
several changes to language semantics in this release.

The intention behind the 0.9 version number is that we're now very close
to the 1.0 stable release.

We now require either Mono 1.1.9 or MS .NET Aug 2005 CTP. There are
still several very serious issues with MS .NET S.R.E. API which may
prevent certain features from working. Under mono there are problems
with generic type serialization.

The performance of the generic code vary. Mono folks didn't
implement shared code yet, which means generic code is JITed for each
instantiation. This isn't that bad as it first look though, after some
tweaks that are already in the Mono 1.1.9 the performance is comparable
to the non-generic version.

In addition we should generate slightly better code overall with this
version. The changes are mostly cosmetic though.

There are some breaking changes in standard library API, because we
dropped our implementation of some generic classes in favor of .NET
library classes. Most previously existing classes are still available
though, but they are now subtypes of their BCL counterparts.

About 500 SVN commits was made since the last release.


Availability
~~~~~~~~~~~~

As usual we provide a source code release and a number of binary
packages. Starting with this release we provide a single noarch RPM
package that should work with all architectures assuming mono is installed
in /usr. MSI package is ready, DEB package is on its way.

Warning: Since 20:00 yesterday UTC till 11:00 today the 0.9.0 packages
were broken. They contained a wrong version of antlr.runtime.dll. This
is now fixed.

For details consult the downloads page: http://nemerle.org/Downloads

-- 
   Michal Moskal,
   http://nemerle.org/~malekith/