HLVM Release Notes

  1. Introduction
  2. What's New
    1. New Features
    2. Significant Changes
    3. Platform Support
  3. Known Problems
  4. Installation Notes

Author: Reid Spencer.

Introduction

Welcome to the High Level Virtual Machine (HLVM). This document contains the release notes for HLVM. Here we describe what's new, what changed, what platforms are supported, known problems, and installation notes.

This document can be updated as things are discovered after the software is released. If you are reading this from the release files, you should go to the HLVM Releases Site to read the most recent version. If you are reading this from the SVN sources, the release notes apply to the next release of HLVM, not the most recent release.

For information on upcoming releases and future plans, please refer to the HLVM Release Plans page.

For more information on HLVM, please visit the main HLVM web site. If you have questions or comments, you should send them to the HLVM Developers List

What's New

This is the second public release of the High Level Virtual Machine. This is a very early pre-release, version 0.2. That is, HLVM is not complete yet and it doesn't do very much yet. The main goal for this release is to get HLVM to be "Turing Complete".

New Features In HLVM 0.2

Here are the main things accomplished in this release:

  1. hlvm-gentestcase. This new tool will automatically generate XML test cases for HLVM. This tool is incorporated into the test suite and will randomly select 100 test cases of varying complexity and size.

Significant Changes in HLVM 0.2

Here are things that have changed since the last release:

  1. Aliases Removed. The original intent behind aliases was to support some kind of "typedef" feature and provide alternate names for types. However, since every type in HLVM is required to have an explicit name and type identification is done by name, the alias feature was redundant and not well aligned with the other types. Consequently it has been removed.

Platform Support

HLVM is known to work on the following platforms:

  1. x86 machines running Linux (FC3, FC5, SuSE)
  2. PPC machines running Mac OS/X (10.4 Tiger)

HLVM probably runs on many other operating systems and hardware but the developers have not yet tried them. If you are successful in bulding HLVM on another platform, please let us know!

Known Problems

The main known problem with this release is that there isn't enough of HLVM implemented to be useful in any significant way.

Installation Notes

Please see the Getting Started Guide that accompanies these relese notes.