This is our first major release.

Major updates:

• There is now an Eclipse plugin for Orc, compatible with Eclipse versions 3.3 and later. It is available from the Downloads page. Thanks go to John Thywissen for his hard work in creating this plugin.
• We have introduced experimental support for exception handling. Exceptions are documented in the user guide. Thanks go to Andrew Matsuoka for his hard work in designing and implementing this feature.
• The static typechecker is now a permanent language feature. It is no longer experimental, though it is still optional to use. It is documented in the user guide.

Minor updates:

• The isolated keyword, which creates isolated actors, is now disabled by default; use -allowIsolated to enable it.
• Parser error reporting has only slightly improved; in particular, the parser will clearly report when an Orc program has no goal expression.
• Relative paths in include are now relative to the file that contains the declaration, rather than an Eclipse workspace or some system default. The -I switch still works as before.
• There is now an equality pattern, =x, which matches against the value bound to x, rather than binding a value to x.
• The AST classes within the compiler have been significantly refactored to improve readability.

This weekend the project made some major administrative changes.

• Most importantly, we changed project hosting from SourceForge to Google Code. All SourceForge services are now deactivated, including CVS and hosting of old releases. Old releases are available in source code form via version control; if there is demand for pre-packaged binaries of old releases, I can put them on Google Code.
• We changed version control systems from CVS to Subversion. Google Code has the SVN repository information. For more details on the switch, see MigratingToSvn.
• We changed our source code license to the "New" BSD license. The new license has more liberal terms than our previous license (which forbade commercial use) so this should not affect anybody already using our code.
• We cleaned up our library dependencies to ensure we are complying with licensing terms for all bundled third-party libraries.
• We released version 0.9.8, primarily to make the binaries available under the new license.

This is a maintenance release, with no significant new non-experimental features.

NEW FEATURES

• Allow Orc to load include files from the filesystem: use the -I option to specify the include path.
• Experimental support for "isolated" actors which are garbage collected when blocked permanently.
• Adding Record site for creating record-like objects.
• Demo of a compiler backend which translates OIL into Orc-like source text.
• Adding -oil option to Orc compiler to output Oil.
• Report parse errors in include files more clearly. Report a few kinds of parse errors (where backtracking is unwarranted) more clearly.
• Type assertions are now available; write :!: T to assert T as the type of an expression or the return type of a definition.

CHANGES

• Detect when a program is blocked permanently (sometimes) and halt execution.
• New semantics for nested logical timers: a parent timer can advance when its children are quiescent (as opposed to halted).
• Moving lib.data to lib.state.
• All non-Kilim Java methods and constructors should evaluate in the "sites" thread.
• Publish pattern (!p) has been removed from the language completely.
• Before/After events no longer appear in traces. A future version will restore this functionality.

BUG FIXES

• Fix parsing of floating point. Bug found by Sydney.
• Fix Eclipse 3.1 compilation issues.
• Fixing OIL->XML serialization error with Orc field values.
• Fixing parse error for "type x = lambda () :: ..."

We recently completed a new paper to appear in Proceedings of FMOODS/FORTE 2009, where Prof. Misra is the invited speaker. While most of the material in the paper has already appeared in an expanded form in the user guide, this paper serves as a slightly more compact introduction to the Orc language and its use.

Our project's SourceForge CVS repository has been inaccessible since sometime yesterday evening. According to http://apps.sourceforge.net/wordpress/sourceforge/2009/03/11/2009-03-10-service-cvs-unplanned-downtime-update/ service will not be restored until sometime Friday. Apologies for any inconvenience.

UPDATE Fri Mar 13 1am: CVS service appears to be restored now.