Its existence guarantees nothing in itself, and the catalytic or Promethean moment only occurs when one individual is prepared to cease being the passive listener to such a voice and to become instead is spokesman, or representative.

But it’s important to remember the many dreary years when the prospect of victory appeared quite unattainable. On every day of those years, the “as if” pose had to be kept up, until its cumulative effect could be felt.

– Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

On behalf of the Parrot team, I’m proud to announce the 4.4.0 release of Parrot “Banana Fanna Fo Ferret”. Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 4.4.0 is available on Parrot’s FTP site, or by following the download instructions. For those who want to hack on Parrot or languages that run on top of Parrot, we recommend our organization page on GitHub, or you can go directly to the official Parrot Git repo on Github.

Parrot 4.4.0 News:

- Core
    + Most internal calls to libc exit(x) have been replaced with
      Parrot_x_* API calls or PARROT_FORCE_EXIT
- Documentation
    + 'pdd31_hll.pod' made stable in 'docs/pdds/'.
    + Updated main 'README' to 'README.pod'
    + Updated various dependencies, e.g., 'lib/Parrot/Distribution.pm'.
    + Updated all 'README' files to 'README.pod' files.
    + Added 'README.pod' files to top-level directories.
- Tests
    + Update various tests to pull from new 'README.pod'
    + Updated 't/tools/install/02-install_files.t' to pull from new
      'README.pod'
- Community
- Platforms
- Tools
    + pbc_merge has been fixed to deduplicate constant strings and
      merge annotations segments

Alvis Yardley (or a delegate) will release Parrot 4.5.0, the next scheduled monthly release, on June 16th 2012. Subsequent release managers are to be announced. A special thanks to our donors, contributors and volunteers for making this release possible.

Enjoy!

I haven’t been doing enough blogging lately! On Tuesday I put out the 4.4.0 release of Parrot, “Banana Fanna Fo Ferret”. I figured it was a fun play on words. I added a little quote from a favorite writer of mine, Christopher Hitchens. Much of his writings can be pretty inflamatory, but I picked two quotes that related to historical struggles for social progress, and which when read in a certain light (and dramatically out of context) make sense for Parrot too.

The release went off without a problem, and I’ve got a few branches waiting in the environs to be merged. I’m sure I’ll talk about some of those projects if I can get back into a normal blogging rhythm again.