I'm very pleased to annouce the long-awaited release 1.6 of Guaranį.

This release has been delayed for more than 6 months for mainly two
reasons. First, Kaffe entered a long period of instability, because
of several important optimizations, particularly precise garbage
collection, that required me to implement precise walking of Operation
objects and to re-design the mechanism to ensure that MetaObjects can
intercept finalizers even on Objects whose finalizers would typically
be optimized away.

Second, I modified Kaffe so as to use automake and libtool, but it
took me a long time to figure out how to fit Guaranį into the new
Kaffe build environment. I ended up moving the Kaffe-specific Guaranį
sources into kaffe/libraries/extensions, while keeping a Guaranį
top-level tree, now fully autoconfiscated, automade (?) and
libtoolized.

Now, the source tree of Kaffe is part of the Guaranį distribution.
Installing Guaranį has become much easier. After extracting a single
tar file, you just have to configure, make all, optionally make check,
then make install. No more patch installations, no more separate
downloading of a Kaffe snapshot, no more moving files around for the
installation!


Even though today's snapshot of Kaffe is not exactly reliable on some
of the platforms I've tested, it is doing quite well on Intel-based
platforms such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris7, as well as
Solaris2.*/sparc and Digital Unix 4/alpha. It also runs reasonably
well on GNU/Linux/alpha and /sparc and IRIX 5 and 6. SunOS4/sparc
still has problems, mostly at start-up; if it survives some initial
race condition, it runs quite well, but you have to be lucky :-( But
then, who runs SunOS4 these days :-)


Well, enough of Kaffe! :-) The news concerning Guaranį are: (i)
MetaLogger has become part of the Guaranį API, and (ii) there's a new
MetaObject subclass, called MetaBlocker, that rejects all operations
on each newly-created object until a MetaObject is assigned to it,
i.e., when the creator's MetaObject returns from `configure'. It
ensures that a composer retains control over a new object even when it
hands the object to component meta-objects. This fixes a rather
serious security problem in our reflective architecture.


Well, that's it. I hope you enjoy this new release. As always, it's
available in the Guaranį Home Page. (If you still don't know the URL,
just follow the link from my personal home page below :-)

Happy hacking,

--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
{oliva,Alexandre.Oliva}@... aoliva@{acm.org,computer.org}
oliva@{gnu.org,kaffe.org,{egcs,sourceware}.cygnus.com,samba.org}
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