On Jun 24, 2014, at 06:30 , Marvin Humphrey <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Peter Karman <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I think it's been awhile since I asked this last and there's been some
>> repo churn.
>> 
>> What's stopping us from a 0.4 release?
> 
> We've been blocking for a while on severing Clownfish from Lucy, but
> that's now finished, hooray! The big remaining question mark is
> maturity of the Clownfish API.  If we punt on the issue and hide the
> Clownfish API, so that the Clownfish distro is essentially an opaque
> prereq for Lucy, the amount of work left to make a Lucy 0.4.0 release
> is reasonably small.
> 
> Releasing an opaque Clownfish alongside Lucy will give us a chance to
> work out bugs which have been introduced during the refactoring. Then
> we can reveal great new features like the C API on subsequent releases
> which enjoy greater stability.

Yes, I think Clownfish is ready for release. The only thing that still needs 
work is the documentation, especially for the Clownfish compiler. I updated the 
cfc-pod branch which generates some minimal documentation for the CFC Perl 
bindings from the C header files. It’s an ugly hack but properly extracting 
DocuComments from C code is hard. The alternative would be to maintain separate 
POD files. (In retrospect, I think the Clownfish compiler should have been 
written as a Clownfish project itself using a simple bootstrapping version in 
Perl. This would save us some headaches in the long run.)

Then we have to adjust the documentation of the Clownfish header file language 
for some of the recent renaming. The documentation of the C API for Clownfish 
and Lucy needs work, too, but that’s something we can postpone.

I think the best way to proceed is to put a Clownfish dev release on CPAN as 
soon as possible. This gives us a lot of testers for free and it’s a great way 
to review the documentation.

Nick

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