[DotGNU]Portable.NET 0.3.6 and pnetlib 0.2.0 released

[Rhys Weatherley]

Portable.NET 0.3.6 and pnetlib 0.2.0 have been released:

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.3.6.tar.gz
Library:  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.2.0.tar.gz

A lot of work on stablising the runtime engine and C# compiler
in this release.  The changes are detailed in the appended NEWS
entries.

Cheers,

Rhys.

Portable.NET 0.3.6 (11 May 2002)

Runtime engine:

* Implement "pread_this" and "pwrite_this" CVM instructions to
  speed up common field access operations.
* Method profiling.
* Recognise invalid program entry points.
* Stub "Reflection.Emit" internalcalls.
* Make sure that "ilverify" loads the assembly dependencies.
* Insert stack traces into exception objects that are created
  by the engine.
* Implement stack resizing and overflow checks (Jonathan Springer).
* Internalcalls for "ArgIterator" and "TypedReference".
* Wrong pointer used to get field names in "Enum.GetEnumName".

C# Compiler:

* Compile against the correct system library (builtin vs pnetlib).
* Semantic analysis and code generation for the array "new" operator.
* Correct handling of "beforefieldinit" on classes.
* Output the correct security attributes to mark assemblies as "unsafe".
* Do not insert coercions into the result type of an operator.
* Don't call "yyerrok" at EOF, because it will cause an infinite loop.
* Recognise "ThrowExpr" and "LineInfo" as "return" statements.
* Add extra scope nodes to handle local variables with the same
  name in different lexical contexts.
* Begin semantic analysis for attributes (not yet complete).
* Non-static field initializers.
* Code generation for "ref" and "out" argument variables.
* New keywords to be compatible with features of Microsoft's C#
compiler:
  "__arglist", "__makeref", "__reftype", and "__refvalue".
* Improve method, field, and property handling for value types.
* Semantic analysis for the array case of "foreach".
* Add the "-fsave-asm" option to assist with debugging.
* Do not generate branch instructions at the end of a "then" case
  that ends in a "return" statement.
* Reversed test in code generation for "!".

Documentation and Samples:

* csdoc2test: create test stubs from ECMA documentation (Gopal V).
* csdocvalil: process multiple "-fimage" options.
* engine/HACKING: document the engine architecture more fully.
* codepage.cs: add command-line options to dump the contents
  of a code page.
* csdoc: bug fixes to XML output generation.

Linker:

* Fix linking of synthetic types.

Loader and Metadata:

* Scan up the class hierarchy when resolving MemberRef's for "base.X"
  expressions.
* Resolve the class before determining if it is enumerated or a
delegate.
* Bug fix to ILWriterTextWrite that caused invalid data to be written.
* Fix attribute parsing in "ser_parse.c".
* Recognise builtin attribute like "DllImport", "MarshalAs", etc, and
  convert them into the proper metadata definitions (not linked into
  the compiler yet).

Platform Support:

* Begin adding threading primitives to "support" (not linked into
  the engine yet).
* Implement "Socket.Select" (Charlie Carnow).
* Print an error when a child process exits with a signal to catch
  SEGV's within the compiler toolchain.
* Make the socket code use a consistent address format.

Other:

* csant: pass "/noconfig" to csc to stop it linking in the Microsoft
  "System.dll" and "System.Xml.dll" assemblies instead of ours.
* Rename source files with duplicate names to get around problems
  with setting breakpoints in gdb.
* libgc: fix a Win32-ism that was affecting Cygwin builds.
* libffi: update to latest version from gcc CVS tree.

pnetlib 0.2.0 (11 May 2002)

* Bug fixes to System.Uri, System.IO.StringWriter (Stephen Compall).
* System.IO.StringReader, System.IO.MemoryStream (Stephen Compall).
* Test cases for System.String (Gopal V).
* Reversed "shift" value in ISCII code pages (Rhys Weatherley).
* System.IO.Directory (Abhaya Agarwal).
* System.Reflection.Emit, System.ArgIterator (Rhys Weatherley).
* System.Xml.XmlWriter (Peter Minten).
* Lots of small semantic analysis fixes (Rhys Weatherley).