Gforth and Vmgen 0.6.2 released

[Anton Ertl]

Gforth 0.6.2 (including Vmgen) is now available on

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/gforth-0.6.2.tar.gz

The md5 checksum is:

869112bd762b07fc4d2038a2d9965148  gforth-0.6.2.tar.gz

Eventually it should become available on ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gforth/
and its mirrors (see http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html), but this has
not happened in the last five weeks, so it may take some more time.


About Gforth

Gforth is a fast and portable implementation of the ANS Forth
language. It works nicely with the Emacs editor, offers some nice
features such as input completion and history, backtraces, a
decompiler and a powerful locals facility, and it even has a
manual. Gforth combines traditional implementation techniques with
newer techniques for portability and performance: its inner
interpreter is direct threaded with several optimizations, but you can
also use a traditional-style indirect threaded interpreter.  Gforth is
distributed under the GNU General Public license (see COPYING).

Gforth runs under Unix, Win32, MacOS X, OS/2, and DOS and should not
be hard to port to other systems supported by GCC. This version has
been tested successfully on the following platforms:

 alpha-dec-osf4.0d
 alpha-unknown-linux-gnu
 alphapca56-unknown-linux-gnu
 hppa1.1-unknown-linux-gnu
 hppa2.0n-hp-hpux11.00
 hppa2.0w-hp-hpux11.11
 i386-unknown-freebsd5.1
 i686-pc-cygwin
 i686-pc-linux-gnu
 mips-sgi-irix6.5
 mipsel-pc-linux-gnu
 powerpc-apple-darwin5.4
 powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
 sparc-sun-sunos4.1.4
 sparc-unknown-linux-gnu


User-visible changes between 0.6.1 and 0.6.2:

Bug fixes (in particular, gforth-0.6.2 compiles with gcc-3.3)
New words: LATEST, LATESTXT (LASTXT deprecated)
Operating environment: Added optional support for a C interface built
  on the ffcall libraries (more portable and powerful than the old
  one, but still not documented).  To use it, the ffcall libraries
  have to be installed before building Gforth (see INSTALL).
Miscellaneous: Gforth-fast now uses static superinstructions (some
  speedup on some platforms); generally this is transparent (apart
  from the speedup), but there are lots of command-line options for
  controlling the static superinstruction generation.


About Vmgen:

Vmgen generates much of the code for efficient virtual machine (VM)
interpreters from simple descriptions of the VM instructions.  It
generates code for executing VM instructions (with optional tracing),
for generating VM code, for disassembling VM code, and for profiling
VM instruction sequences.  Interpreters created with vmgen usually are
faster than competing interpreters and are typically only a factor of
2-10 slower than the code generateed by native-code compilers.

The Vmgen home page is at
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/vmgen/>.

User-visible changes between 0.6.1 and 0.6.2:

You now have to define a macro MAYBE_UNUSED (see manual); useful for
  suppressing expected "unused variable" warnings.

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl                    Some things have to be seen to be believed
address@hidden Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html