DN538669459

Subject: UPDATE: 8.3alpha development report - DN [1]

Jeffrey Hobbs <jeffrey.hobbs@scriptics.com> - 20 Oct 1999 - comp.lang.tcl

 For those who have an interest in the current status of 8.3,
 here's a little report.  Several changes have occured in the
 past couple of weeks that might make it interesting for some
 to test the NetCVS dev source tree.

 * There are about 330 lines of changes since 8.2.0 (some were
 back-ported to 8.2.1, most not).

 * There is an entirely new regular expression engine, courtesy
 of Henry Spencer.  This one should use much less stack space.

 * I have gone through and Purified all of Tcl on Unix.  I can
 now run the full range of tests, threaded or non-threaded,
 without a single leak.  There are some UMRs and such, but these
 seem to be innocuous.  Of note, I plugged a leak for each created
 process on Unix, as well as leaks for each thread were cleaned up.

 * new 'file channels' method

 * a lot of clean up in the test suites

 * new 'array unset' method

 * new 'clock clicks -milliseconds' switch

 * new Tcl_AppendResultVA (should be happy for LinuxPPC now)

 * fix for insidious crash when releasing literal table

 * fix for event/io problems with threads

 * a few other things (see ChangeLog)

 Tk didn't see much in this last haul, as I was focused on
 Purify'ing Tcl (bring on the Spanish Inquisition!).

 In the coming month, I plan on running Purify over Tcl on NT,
 and focusing more on getting submitted patches into Tcl/Tk for
 8.3 (one I've already mentioned, like Img and Dash).

 I wanted to let you know about this "milestone", because I
 consider the current CVS sources (for 10/20/99) to be very
 suitable for testing purposes.  8.3 won't have any special alpha
 releases as I add new features.  I want to get what I can in and
 make a 8.3b1 as soon as I can.  Skipping full alpha releases adds
 a lot more time to my work schedule for adding new things.

 --
    Jeffrey Hobbs                          The Tcl Guy
    jeffrey.hobbs at scriptics.com         Scriptics Corp.