Release announcement for Gambas 2.0 RC1

After almost two years of development, we announce the first release candidate of Gambas 2.

We're making this announcement now in hopes of attracting more testers users to the project during the release candidate cycle, to help us find any bugs we might have missed.

Gambas is a full-featured object language and development environment based on a BASIC interpreter. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence. Its architecture is very inspired by Java: a Gambas executable is an archive of compiled classes and data files that is executed by a custom interpreter.

Gambas is made up of:

* A compiler.
* An interpreter.
* An archiver.
* A scripter.
* A development environment.
* Many extension components.

The compiler is a fast little executable written in C:

* It compiles about 128000 non-void lines by second on my own Athlon 2000. This speed allows a quick code/compile/test incremental development process.
* It does almost no optimization at all at the moment, relying on the interpreter for doing the job at runtime.
* It manages and compiles string translations by using the GNU gettext tools.

The interpreter is a small executable also written in C of less than 180 Kb:

* It provides all the native features of the language, by giving an indirect access of almost all the POSIX glibc features.
* It loads classes on demand, optimizing the bytecode the first time it is run.
* The linking between classes is done entirely at runtime too, and the latest as possible. So even a big executable starts quickly.

Finally, the archiver is a program that creates a Gambas executable from a Gambas project directory.

For more information, please refer to the GambasRAD web site.