[ANN] Sydney Developer Preview 1 released

Sydney, an experimental ruby interpreter, has been released!

Release Announcment;
http://blog.fallingsnow.net/articles/2005/07/11/sydney-developer-preview-release-1-out

Tarball: http://blog.fallingsnow.net/archive/sydney-dr1.tar.gz

Sydney is an experimental fork of ruby 1.8.2 that implements a number
of new features, such as Native OS threads, Backtrace and Frame
objects, more event hooks, and many more.

It has reached the a developer release phase after a few months of
development and testing, but it is not ready for primetime! It still
contains many issues that must be resolved before it can be considered
production quality.

Note that it ONLY implements pthread OS threads at the moment, but
work to implement win32 threads is planned to begin soon.

Currently, some conventions that I've interested have broken RDoc's
ability to properly generate from my new C files. That will be fixed
soon, but in the mean time, please consult the tests
(test/sydney/*.rb) for examples and documention of the new features.

I'm sure there will be a number questions about this, so let me answer
of few of them here:

Q: Why did you do all this work on the 1.8 branch and not off of head?
A: I did this because I did not want a moving target in terms of
existing functonality. I was already breaking a number of the
internals and wanted to be able to run reliable tests to monitor my
changes. If I had done my changes against head (1.9) I could have run
into bugs that were not caused by my changes and would therefore been
much harder to fix.

Q: Was this endorsed by the current ruby core developers?
A: No, it was not. I did the work external from them completely, but I
hope that that will change soon.

Q: Do you have something against the ruby core developers?
A: No, I do not. They have done an amazing job with the current
releases and none of my work would have been remotely possible without
their work.

Q: Why did you go and implement these features?
A: Sydney started as an experiment to get familar with the internals
of ruby. I then began to see the need for most of these features
either in RCR's or just in general, and thus I decided to, as one of
my side projects, see how well they could be accomplished.

In the end, I did a lot of this because I found it interesting. And I
know the their are people and applications out there that are eager
for these features.

I look forward to feedback of all kinds.

Evan Webb // [e-mail]