Subject: New Self release

We're pleased to announce a new Self release. The major addition is the availability of the optimizing compiler (the Simple Inlining Compiler, or SIC) for the PowerPC. As a result, Self on Mac OS X now runs significantly faster!

In addition, we have fixed a number of virtual machines bugs. And the SIC has been further refactored; this should simplify the porting of SIC to other architectures.

The Self homepage, at http://research.sun.com/self, contains the new release.

We hope you enjoy using this more-responsive Self system, Michael Abd-El-Malek and David Ungar

PS There is a problem with the Sun web servers dropping connections during a file download. Until this problem is fixed, we recommend the use of the wget Unix utility. (Wget attempts to continue a download, despite server errors, and we have found it capable of fully downloading the Self release packages.)