Parrot 6.6.0 "Parrothead" released!

    As a dreamer of dreams and a travelin' man,
    I have chalked up many a mile.
    Read dozens of books about heroes and crooks,
    And I've learned much from both of their styles.
        -- Heard playing in Margaritaville bar,
           in Orlando after YAPC::NA::2014.

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 6.6.0, also =
known
as "Parrothead".  Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed
at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 6.6.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site
(ftp://ftp.parrot.org/pub/parrot/releases/supported/6.6.0/), or by =
following the
download instructions at http://parrot.org/download.  For those who =
would like
to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using =
Git to
retrieve the source code to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 6.6.0 News:
    - Core
        + Optimized method call overhead at compile-time in pmc2c =
directly
          to avoid run-time overhead. Less temp. PMC's, less branches =
and
          avoiding at least 2 costly C functions per method call.
        + New arity warning:
            "wrong number of arguments: %d passed, %d expected" [GH =
#1080]
    - Build
        + Workaround libffi-3.1 upstream bug in ffi.h [GH #1081]
        + Expand pkg-config make macros in auto::libffi [GH #1082]
    - Tests
        + Fix t/pmc/filehandle.t on cygwin with newer Cwd >=3D 3.40 [GH =
#1077]
    - Community
        + Our GSoC student passed the project midterm, having made great =
progress.
          Congratulations to Chirag Agrawal!
        + More parrot-bench numbers at =
https://github.com/parrot/parrot-bench,
          now using gnuplot for all releases from 1.8.0 - 6.6.0, amd64 + =
-m32


The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:
6d21d3b733d980ab7cb8ee699c59e2b782d8a9c8c0e2cb06d929767e61024ace =
parrot-6.6.0.tar.gz
08e9e02db952828f6ab71755be47f99ebc90894378f04d8e4d7f3bc623f79ff5 =
parrot-6.6.0.tar.bz2

Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our =
sponsors
for supporting this project.  Our next scheduled release is at 19 Aug =
2014.

Enjoy!