GNU 8sync 0.4 released!

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Greetings, all! I'm pleased to announce 8sync 0.3! 8sync is a library
for GNU Guile which provides an asynchronous event loop and which uses
the actor model as its primary concurrency synchronization mechanism.

 - Release: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/8sync/8sync-0.4.0.tar.gz
 - Announcement: https://www.gnu.org/software/8sync/news/8sync-0-4-released.html
 - Website: https://www.gnu.org/software/8sync/

Some highlights:

 - Most excitingly, we now have some decent documentation!

     https://www.gnu.org/software/8sync/manual/html_node/index.html

   Or at the very least, we finally have a tutorial (API documentation
   is still on its way). The tutorial walks from extending an existing
   actor by writing an irc bot, to writing your own basic actors, to
   writing network actors. You *know* you always wanted your very own
   IRC bot, so give it a try!

     https://www.gnu.org/software/8sync/manual/html_node/Tutorial.html

 - Actors are now "center stage". You can now import a toplevel (8sync)
   module, and this module includes the full actor model system. The
   actor model is now *the* way to handle concurrent synchronization in
   8sync. So, 8sync is officially less about its event loop, and more
   about the actor model. (It is even possible that in the future,
   8sync's actor model will be able to run on another event loop.)

 - Actors now also have implicitly run *init* and *cleanup* message
   handlers. Setting up actors now involves a lot less boilerplate,
   since most actors do have some sort of initialization method
   anyway. The *cleanup* message handler allows actors to clean up after
   themselves when they shut down, by closing a socket, deleting
   temporary files, save their current state to a database, or whatever.

 - Sending messages has become slightly easier, as the from-actor field
   is now implicit, set as a parameter by the actor's hive.

And more! See the NEWS file for full details.

Happy hacking!