Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we’re ridiculous, isn’t it true? For it’s actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we’re bored, we don’t know how to look, how to understand, we’re all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you’re not offended when I tell you to your face that you’re ridiculous? And if so, aren’t you material? You know, in my opinion it’s sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can’t understand everything at once, we can’t start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. –Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Idiot

On behalf of the Parrot team, I’m proud to announce Parrot 3.3.0, also known as “Fire in the Sky”. Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 3.3.0 is available on Parrot’s FTP site, or by following the download instructions at http://parrot.org/download. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Git to retrieve the source code to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 3.3.0 News:
- Core
  + The isa and isa_pmc vtables can now be overridden from PIR
  + IMCC has a new improved external interface
  + A new IMCCompiler PMC adds prototype PDD31-alike functionality for the PIR and PASM compilers
  + New --with-llvm option to Configure.pl, which will link to LLVM if it is available
- Community
  + Parrot Virtual Machine was accepted into Google Summer of Code 2011
- Ecosystem
  + Rosella adds a stable "Event" library to implement a publish/subscribe mechanism
- Tests
  + The test coverage of the extend_vtable subsystem was greatly increased

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

8f474d44a0137a3fd5296c019dbccc6ae64193ff12ce799babc362567115c1ad  parrot-3.3.0.tar.bz2
99b81a84bf55a69bc3bbf8bf8dd65bee1417fd1c30c7d08c6859a7a3db892b8f  parrot-3.3.0.tar.gz

Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next scheduled release is 17 May 2011.

Enjoy!