[alice-announce] Alice 1.2 released

[Andreas Rossberg]

We are happy to announce version 1.2 of the Alice programming
system:

      http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/

Alice ML is a functional programming language that enriches the
statically typed, closed functional world of ML with extensive
support for type-safe programming of concurrent, distributed
and open systems. It also features cutting-edge constraint
programming technology in the tradition of Oz/Mozart.

Alice ML is a mostly conservative extension of Standard ML
featuring:

   Futures
      selective laziness and light-weight concurrency with
      implicit dataflow synchronisation
   Higher-order modules
      higher-order functors and abstract signatures
   Packages
      dynamically typed ML modules as first-class values
   Pickling
      type-safe, generic & platform-independent marshalling,
      including code, types and entire modules
   Components
      type-safe lazy dynamic linking across the Internet
   Distribution
      type-safe remote functions and network mobility
   Constraints
      constraint propagation and programmable search for
      solving hard combinatorical problems
   Virtual Machine
      portable implementation with just-in-time compilation
   Interactive tools
      graphical browsers for data structures and search spaces

The highlights of this release are:

   New Byte Code Jitter
      optimized internal byte code produced by jitting, which is
      a lot faster than non-jitted code; unlike native code jitting
      it is available on all platforms
   Improvements to Interactive Toplevel
      many tweaks and fixes in the GUI; new features include type hints,
      and native look&feel on Windows (thanks to Gtk Wimp theme)
   Overhaul of Gecode Constraint Library
      many, many bug fixes in Gecode implementation and binding;
      simplified interface to set constraints
   Overhaul of Gtk Graphics Library
      re-structured into submodules with proper dynamic type checking;
      upgraded to Gtk 2.6, including bindings to GLib, Pango, and Atk
   Regular Expression Library
      a simple binding to the GNU Regex library is now included
   64 Bit Support
      Alice can now support 64 bit architectures; a first package
      is available for Debian AMD 64
   Bug Fixes
      lots of bug fixes and minor improvements all over the place

For a detailed list of changes please see:

      http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/download/CHANGES

Alice is open source under a BSD-style license. Source and binary
packages are currently available for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.

Enjoy,

         - The Alice Team