Today Nicholas Clark, pumpking of the 5.8-maint branch of perl, announced that 5.8.9 will be the last release of that branch.

After this release, it will only receive the same amount of care as all other perl versions do, which boils down to patches for gaping security holes.

I welcome the announcement, because ongoing migration to Perl 5.10 means that I can use these cool features in my code. Since Debian Lenny (scheduled for September this year, but delayed a bit) comes with perl-5.10.0, I'll upgrade soon.

Yesterday I built parrot with llvm-gcc 4.2 and llvm 2.2. It was nice to see all tests passing, which IMHO is a good sign for both parrot and llvm.

It gave no speed benefit over the ordinary gcc 4.2, but I'll try again with later versions of llvm and see how it evolves.

I also tried to compile parrot with clang, but couldn't figure out how not to pass linker options to llvm-ld that it doesn't understand, and I gave up rather quickly.