Release Notes CM3 5.8.2

There have been a lot of changes and improvements since the last release of CM3, 5.4.0, in the fall of 2006. Of course there have been lots of development snapshots and contributed installation archives for various target platforms since then, but, alas, no official release. So we're finally there. In case you wonder why this is release candidate 2 (RC2), that's because the first was only used internally and not announced here.

Quick link to download the archives. Here's an overview of the known problems.

Please refer to the change logs of 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 for a complete list of changes. Here's a summary of the highlights:

• Updated support for various Windows platforms (native, Cygwin, Mingwin, Interix). It is possible to use many Microsoft SDKs (including free ones) as the basis for native support now.
• Many improvements to m3gdb, the Modula-3-aware extension of the GNU debugger. It's still not perfect, but then, what is?
• System pthread threading is now the default on all platforms. On many systems, this allows M3 applications to scale over all available hardware processors.The original (fast) M3 user level thread code is still there and can be used if necessary (on most platforms).
• Many fixes and improvements of the garbage collector.
• Many fixes and improvements of the system pthreads implementation.
• There is a new type LONGINT. It is a 64bit signed integer on all platforms except the native NT "NT386" platform. On NT386 is a 32bits, for now, but we would like to fix that.
• Much improved and restructured CM3 config files.
• Added lots of new quake functions and fixed several quake bugs.
• Import of gcc 4.3.0 as code generating backend.
• Support for new 64 bit target platforms (AMD64_LINUX and others).
• Added CM3-IDE, the open source version of Reactor (tm). This is a browser-based IDE for Modula-3 developement.
• Extensive refactoring of platform specific interfaces and reduction of system dependencies.
• Updated and extended quake documentation. Improved miscellaneous other documentation. Updated all generated source documentation for all packages.
• Addition of manual pages for cm3, quake, m3makefiles.
• Several fixes for pickling code (object (de)serialization).
• Improved allocation code for concurrent use cases.
• Add alternative text implementation which promises much better performance -- not activated yet, but available for testing.
• Improved dynamic linking support using rpath and $ORIGIN.
• Added CVSup to the CM3 repository.
• Compiler support for the minimal tagged REFANY values.
• Make oprtimization at level 3 work for the gcc backend.
• Support for many additional targets.

An extensive regression test framework based on Tinderbox and (recently) Hudson and lots of existing tests has been added, which should help to avoid decrease in quality.

Please find the installation instructions and the archives for download here.