Here it is, everyone! A first official release. It's not perfect, but it's 0.1, and I'm tired of fiddling with it.

There are some issues with the binaries we've posted, so I'm mostly recommending that people use another CL besides ECL if they want to really experiment with Slate.

Anyway, here is the big overview included in NEWS in the archives:

- An initial named release of Slate, with an included documented build procedure for producing stand-alone executables (and loadable binary libraries out of Slate sources). - Slate's implementation is still based upon Common Lisp, although it performs some compilation, so has acceptable performance for basic testing and evaluation. - The current libraries include file access, extensive collection and stream support, and many other basic libraries. - There is no support yet for concurrency or system event-handling. - The manual covers all language features and issues in sufficient detail now for beginners to grasp, and covers all libraries which are not subject to design changes. - The graphics / interface architecture is included in outline form, but is not yet functional. - The bootstrap process is incomplete, but in a presentable state so that you can see the intended run-time architecture and optimizations.

I've put up an entry on the Freshmeat site for Slate, under: http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/slatesmalltalk/

so that people can track it without being involved on the mailing list.

Our home page, http://slate.tunes.org/ now has links to the 3 different package types available. All of them include full sources, and an HTML copy of the online manual under doc/manual/.