[DotGNU]Portable.NET 0.5.0 released!

[Rhys Weatherley]

New versions of all pnet-related components been released:

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.5.0.tar.gz
Library:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.5.0.tar.gz
Libc:     http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetC-0.5.0.tar.gz
Treecc:   http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/treecc-0.2.0.tar.gz
PNetMark: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetmark-0.0.4.tar.gz
Frogger:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetcurses-0.0.2.tar.gz

There are also two Win32/mingw32 zip files this time around:

Pnet:     http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-bin-0.5.0.zip
Treecc:   http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/treecc-bin-0.2.0.zip

This is the most stable release to date of Portable.NET, and should
be an excellent base for to work from to support all of the other
DotGNU components.

Congratulations to everyone who helped out on the release.  Even greater
things to come in the months ahead.

Cheers,

Rhys.

Portable.NET 0.5.0 (11 January 2003)

Runtime engine:

* Internalcalls for querying information about the runtime engine.
* Inline 2D array operations to remove the method call overhead.
* Internalcalls for "System.IO" (Gopal V, Aditya P. Bansod).
* Fixes to "System.String" internalcalls (Jonathan Springer, Rhys).
* Implement "GetValue" and "SetValue" for fields (Gopal V, Rhys).
* "Marshal.PtrToStruct" (Gopal V).
* Verifier fixes for native pointers and arrays (Gopal V).
* Pop garbage from the stack when "leave" is seen (Gopal V).
* Better reporting for exceptions that cannot be converted into strings.
* Intern strings at verification time, not use time.
* Fixes to "System.Enum" internalcalls (Jeff Post).
* Deserialize attributes properly.

C# Compiler:

* Ensure that value types are never zero-sized even if they don't
  have any fields.
* Negation of int64 constants when converting literal fields.
* Reset the "overflowInsns" value when jumping into another context
  so that the destination value is used, not the source value.
* Allow "this" to be used as an l-value within value types.
* Reduction in strength optimizations (Gopal V).
* Use of enum constants in function calls (Gopal V).
* Array initializers (Gopal V, Rhys Weatherley).
* Problems in best method candidate resolution (Gopal V).
* "base.X" property set calls.
* Recognize "null" properly in member accesses (Gopal V).
* Adjustments to how "-nostdlib" works (Gopal V).
* Delegate creation expressions (Gopal V).
* Implement the "using" and "fixed" statements (Gopal V).
* Use type-specific semantic analysis for "typeof" (Gopal V).
* Implement the pointer address-of operator (Gopal V).
* Support for "extern" properties (Gopal V).
* Fixes for no-argument attributes and attributes whose classes do
  not end in "Attribute" (Gopal V).
* Revamp error message reporting for virtual overrides (Gopal V).
* Inhibit infinite loops in operator resolution (Gopal V).
* Order of compilation issues for nested classes (Gopal V).
* Force local variables to be initialized with ".locals init".
* Work around C# compilers that use the underlying type for enums.

C Compiler:

* Implicit coercions between C and C# string types in interop code.

Assembler:

* Fix parsing of octal escape sequences.
* Turn the assembler into a library that can be directly linked
  into the "cscc" compiler front-end.

Disassembler:

* Fixed word order in dumping of the "ldc.i8" operand.
* Round-tripping fixes.

Documentation:

* Man page for ildb.
* Generate better-formatted code in "csdoc2stub" (Gopal V).

Linker:

* Resource-only satellite assembly support.
* Handle multiple definitions of struct types in C object files.
* Favour struct definitions in a C library over the program's version.

Loader and Metadata:

* Fix relocation information in the Win32 exe stub.
* Add native offsets to fields so that we can eventually support
  marshalling of structures with different IL/native layouts.
* Correct encoding of marshal types with unspecified array elements.
* Multi-dimensional array encodings.
* Revove duplicate entries from the PropertyMap and EventMap tables.
* Allow zero-length strings in the "#Strings" blob.

Cryptopgraphy:

* Ignore parity bits when comparing Triple-DES keys.
* Implement the cryptographically secure random number generator.
* Robustness fixes for NULL algorithm handles.

Csant:

* Extra properties for cscc plugin locations.
* Add the "delete" task (Gopal V).
* Implement "if" conditionals for file sets (Gopal V).

Platform Support:

* Fix overflow-tested multiplication of 64-bit values to stop truncation.
* Wait events (Thong Nguyen).
* Work around bugs in "isinf" on certain platforms.
* Rename instances of "errno" to "error" to avoid problems on
  platforms where "errno" is a macro.
* Add support for mingw32 builds under Windows.
* Integrate glibc's regex so that we have a consistent set of regex
  handling routines across the stack.
* Centralize path searching so the install location can be made
  variable on Win32 systems.
* Win32-specific directory routines.
* Implement globbing for systems that don't do it automtically.

Other:

* Update RPM spec files (Gopal V, Stephen Compall).
* Add "--disable-optimizations" to "configure" (James McParlane).
* Fix "fopen" call in resgen for CRLF systems (David Dawkins).
* Out of tree builds for libffi and libgc (Stephen Compall).
* Remove files from the tree that are created by "auto_gen.sh"
  and "configure".
* Remove the need for "acconfig.h" (David Dawkins, Rhys Weatherley).
* Move "csunit" and "csupport" to the pnetlib repository.
* Remove all pre-compiled assemblies from the pnet repository because
  pnetlib can now build cleanly from source using cscc.
* Microsoft-style command-line options for various tools.
* Install libgc and libffi.


pnetlib 0.5.0 (11 January 2003)

* Move "csunit", "csupport", and "samples" out of pnet into pnetlib.
* Make "csunit" more robust when running against the ECMA libraries.
* Prevent double-reporting of failures in "csunit".
* Update RPM spec files (Gopal V, Stephen Compall).
* Test cases and bug fixes for "System.Security.Cryptography".
* Remove files from the repository that are created by "auto_gen.sh".
* Allow zero-length copies in "Array.Copy".
* Number formatting and parsing (Jonathan Springer).
* Complete implementation of "System.Environment".
* Remove unnecessary preambles from UTF-8 and Unicode streams.
* Use "StreamReader" and "StreamWriter" for console streams.
* Implement missing functionality in "System.Activator".
* Date time formatting (Michael Moore).
* Fixes for "NameValueCollection" (Jeff Post).
* System.IO (Gopal V, Aditya P. Bansod, Craig Altenburg).
* System.Xml (Rhys Weatherley, Adam Ballai, others).
* System.ComponentModel (Rhys Weatherley, Gopal V).
* Marshal.PtrToStructure (Gopal V).
* Wait handles (Thong Nguyen).
* Various ECMA-compatibility fixes.
* Implement minor compatbility assemblies in "compat".
* Return an exit status of 1 when "csunit" fails.
* German resource translations (Rainer Groesslinger).
* Satellite assembly support for foreign language translations.
* Custom marshalling classes.
* Array and ArrayList sorting.
* Fixes for building with the mingw32 version of pnet.
* Integrate Mono's regular expression library (Gopal V).
* System.Net.WebRequest, WebResponse (Jason Lee).
* Make the I18N system robust against missing handler libraries.
* Stub out some Reflection.Emit classes (Gopal V).
* Various attributes and minor classes (Gopal V, Ian Fung, others).
* Enum formatting and conversion fixes (Jeff Post).
* Inhibit UTF-8 preambles on Console streams.
pnetC 0.5.0 (11 January 2003)

* Bring the version number into sync with "pnet".
* Build fixes related to moving assemblies out of "pnet" into "pnetlib".
* Fake password file library.
* Stub out pthread-style mutexes to help in building thread-safe code.

treecc 0.2.0 (11 January 2003)

* Bind the skeleton files directly into the "treecc" binary,
  to solve problems with locating the skeletons at runtime.
* Always disable cygwin for Win32 builds.
* Better support for out of tree builds.
* Fix up end of line handling in the test suite so that the
  tests don't fail because of CRLF vs LF issues.
* Add the "interal_access" and "public_access" options to
  support creating private libraries of nodes in C#.
* Fix the "-f" (force) command-line flag.
* PHP back-end (Alan Knowles).