[DotGNU]Portable.NET 0.4.4 released

[Rhys Weatherley]

New versions of pnet, pnetlib, pnetC, and treecc have been released:

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.4.4.tar.gz
Library:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.2.8.tar.gz
pnetC:    http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetC-0.0.2.tar.gz
Treecc:   http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/treecc-0.1.4.tar.gz

The biggest change to this release is the introduction of a C compiler
front-end for cscc, and the companion C library "pnetC".

Those of you who have C skills and are interested in helping out on
Portable.NET may like to contribute to "pnetC", to build it into a
useful C library for CLI platforms.

Lots of other little fixes to the runtime engine, C# compiler, etc.

See the appended NEWS entries for the full details.

Cheers,

Rhys.

Portable.NET 0.4.4 (2 September 2002)

Runtime engine:

* Verifier fix: "rethrow" can be used even if the stack isn't empty.
* Verifier fix: correct the stack height adjustment for "sizeof".
* Implement the "Module.GetModuleType" internalcall.
* Correctly detect PInvoke'd delegate types.
* Reset "finalLen" before the final phase of "String.Replace".
* AssignCompatible: resolve classes before checking for compatibility.
* Allow managed pointers to be turned into any kind of unmanaged
  pointer in unsafe code.
* Implement the CVM "ldrva" instruction, to support C string globals.
* Shift the C# command-line creation logic into "libILEngine.a".
* Return the correct array for "TaskMethods.GetCommandLineArgs".
* Implement "Marshal.AllocHGlobal" using "calloc" instead of "malloc".
* Remove redundant "nop" statements from the x86 code unroller.
* Fix the padding of "CVMWord" so that it is 4 on all i386 platforms.
* _ILCallPackVaParams: copy the "va_list" using memcpy, because a
  direct structure copy won't work on platforms that define "va_list"
  as an array type.
* Reversed array bounds check in "lib_array.c".

Compiler:

* Attribute target specifications.
* Fully qualify method references for properties and events.
* Don't copy the class attributes to the default constructor.
* Parsing, semantic analysis, and code generation for the C language.
* Support for the "cpp" pre-processor in the compiler common code.
* Fix stack height adjument for "return" code generator.
* Set the correct line numbers when replacing l-value nodes during
  semantic analysis.
* Bug in the "+=" string concatenation operator.
* Implement array initializers in "new" expressions.
* Process ".il" files with the assembler from the compiler front-end.
* Bug fixes and adjustments to the code generator to support C code.
* Push into a loop context during semantic analysis of "foreach".
* Add the "__module" and "__long_double" keywords to the C# compiler,
  to support integration with C code.
* "-nostdlib" now turns off the standard library assemblies, but not
  the standard library search path.
* Properly cast the element type to the variable type in "foreach".

Documentation and Samples:

* Document the C application binary interface and create a C user's guide.

Assembler:

* Allow global fields and methods to be mixed with ordinary types.
* Change the "<Module>" type to "public" if it contains public globals.
* Move dangling globals to the "<ModuleExtern>" type.

Linker:

* Link ".sdata" and ".tls" sections.
* Sort the field, method, and parameter tables at the end of the
  link or assembly process, instead of between each top-level class.
* Link support for C object modules.
* Explode ".a" files to their contents at link time.
* Fix linking and loading behaviour of vararg methods across assembly
  boundaries.
* Automatically link against recursively-referenced assemblies.
* Add link objects to the linker context in a single pass before
  processing their contents.
* Renaming private types to prevent clashes between definitions in
  multiple C object files.

Loader and Metadata:

* Store the correct signature in a "MemberRef" when it is loaded.
* Add extra padding at the beginning of a PE/COFF image to support
  programs with 4 or more sections.

Platform Support:

* Bug fixes to hash table iterators.
* Hack "libgc/mark.c" to work around cygwin 1.3 problems.

Other:

* Create the "OpenSystem.C" library, which provides C compiler intrinsics.
* Correct a bug in the opcode definition of "stind.i".

pnetlib 0.2.8 (2 September 2002)

* System.Runtime.Serialization, System.Xml.
* Add "System.dll" to the references for "System.Xml.dll".
* Pass the correct type information to "Module.GetMethodImpl".
* Fixes to String.Split, System.IO.File, StringBuilder (Gopal V).
* Missing Receive method in "Socket" (Peter Minten).
* Patches to I18N for Mono integration.

pnetC 0.0.2 (2 September 2002)

* Initial formal release of "pnetC".

treecc 0.1.4 (2 September 2002)

* Fixes to "auto_gen.sh" and autoconf/automake support scripts
  to better support automake 1.6 systems.