[abc-announce] abc version 1.2.1 released

The abc team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.2.1 of abc.
Highlights include the following:

* An improved implementation of tracematches. In particular, the new
  indexing optimisation is now based on our own implementation of
  a weak reference map, eliminating problems that were due to
  the earlier use of the Apache commons collections. This is the
  world's first robust, efficient implementation of this type of
  language feature, so we're very keen on feedback! A separate set
  of examples and benchmarks can be found at

    http://abc.comlab.ox.ac.uk/packages/tmbenches.{tar.gz,zip}

  Full technical details are described in our technical report

    http://abc.comlab.ox.ac.uk/documents/abc-2006-1.{pdf,ps}

* In anticipation of new extensions that are in the works, we have
  also reworked the reweaving analysis infrastructure, so multiple
  reweaving analyses can be used simultaneously.

* Finally, this release contains many bug fixes, and it upgrades
  to Polyglot 1.3.3. as well as the latest versions of Soot and
  Paddle.

As usual, the release can be downloaded from
http://aspectbench.org/download, and a more detailed
changelog can be found below.

Cheers,
Pavel (on behalf of the abc team)

Changelog:
Users:
- abc now supports mutiple reweaving analyses. Those analyses are
  executed on the woven program and may change e.g. the residues
  in order to produce a different (e.g. more efficient) woven
  program. See abc.main.AbcExtension.createReweavingPasses(List) for an
  example integration of our CFlow optimization.
  Custom analyses need to implement the
  abc.weaving.weaver.ReweavingAnalysis interface.
  They are scheduled via instances of ReweavingPass.
  Passes can also be annotated with a timeout so that abc stops them
  automatically when exceeding this timeframe.
- There have been a number of fixes to the 'indexing' optimisation
  for tracematches. In particular, it should now behave correctly even
  for tracematches that include "non-collectable weak reference
  indices". Depending on the base program, there may also be
  performance improvements (we have observed up to 10%).

Extenders:
- abc has been upgraded to use a newer version of the Polyglot compiler
  framework. We now use Polyglot 1.3.2, which should significantly
  improve compilation of pure-java programs.
Received on Fri Aug 04 19:17:18 2006