[Xotcl] XOTcl 0.85.3

[Gustaf Neumann]

Dear XOTcl comminity,

here comes the annoucement of patchlevel 3 for XOTcl.
best regards

-gustaf

PS: Some other good news: ActiveState is planning to include XOTcl in the
next ActiveTcl release....
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XOTcl 0.85.3
************

RECENT CHANGES relative to 0.85p2 are:

  - Speedup for parameter methods:

    Methods for accessing parameters are now 4 to 5 times faster.
    In the following example, "name" and "age" are parameters:
        Class Person -parameter {{age 0} name}
        Person p1 -age 99 -name -gustaf
	puts [p1 age]
    setting and retrieving of parameters has now roughly the same
    speed as the set methods (about 20% faster than instvars)


  - Reduced memory consumption for objects and classes:

    The size of XOTclObject structure went from 172 bytes 
    to 68 bytes by 

      * allocating assertion structures on demand, and 
      * by and by omitting in the default setup metadata

    10 thousand XOTcl objects consume now about 7 MB of memory.
    There is still little potential for savings in the
    C-structure (by using bitmasks), but most of the memory
    consumed by XOTcl objects are in the tcl-memory structures for
    namespaces etc.


  - Support for AOLserver:
 
    XOTcl is now prepared for use in the AOL-server. The stubs for
    AOL-server are integrated in XOTcl (many thanks to 
    Zoran Vasiljevic). The required patch for the AOL-Server 
    is available from http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download.html#aol


  - Stub-library support:

    XOTcl supports now the stub library. This means that
    it is less dependent on particular Tcl implementations.
    The support was quite tricky since some commands used by XOTcl
    (like Tcl_IncrObjCmd, Tcl_UpvarObjCmd, ...) are 
    not exported by the stub library, and the solution
    has to work in the multithreaded AOL-server environment)


  - various small optimizations and code cleanups

  - some actiweb fixes (agent migration was broken)

For more details, please check the ChangeLog file.

Best regards,

Gustaf Neumann