[yasm-announce] ANNC: Yasm 0.5.0rc2 (Release Candidate 2)

[Peter Johnson]

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Yasm 0.5.0rc1, the second 
release candidate for the fifth milestone release of the Yasm Modular 
Assembler.  The purpose of this release is to shake down what bugs we can 
prior to the 0.5.0 release, as there have been some significant new 
features added since the previous release.

New features in this release candidate (compared to 0.5.0rc1):

   - Support for CodeView 8.0 source debugging (as used by Visual Studio
     2005).
   - Fixed -I support to properly handle relative paths (now the search
     pattern is essentially identical to most C compilers). This change is
     backwards incompatible (to both NASM and earlier Yasm versions), but
     is much more consistent.
   - Standard macros that provide version information: __YASM_MAJOR__,
     __YASM_MINOR__, __YASM_SUBMINOR__, __YASM_BUILD__, __YASM_VERSION_ID__
     and __YASM_VER__.
   - A number of bug fixes (too many to list individually here).

New features in this release candidate (compared to 0.4.0) include:

   - Aliases for AMD64 object formats: "win64" and "elf64" (these
     automatically set the machine to "amd64").
   - "x64" alias for Win64 object format (for easier use with Visual
     Studio).
   - DWARF2 debugging format (enable with "-g dwarf2").
   - GAS parser good enough to take GCC output for both AMD64 and 32-bit
     x86 (including DWARF2 debug information).
   - Dozens of bugfixes in x86 and AMD64 support.
   - Specifying "amd64" as the machine (or using a 64-bit object format)
     automatically sets BITS 64.

Known issues with this release candidate include:

   - List output is buggy and often outright wrong.
   - The optimizer is a very basic 2-pass style and generates inefficient
     (large) code at times.  We're hoping to fix this before the 0.5.0
     final release.

Release Notes for 0.5.0rc2:

http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/wiki/Release0.5.0rc2

Downloads from the Yasm website include .tar.gz source (for Unix systems) 
and Win64, Win32, CygWin, and DOS executables:

http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/wiki/Download

Please download, test, and tinker, and most importantly, send comments and 
bug reports!  Thanks to all those who submitted bug reports and 
contributed code for this release.  More developers are welcome to join us 
as well.

Look for the 0.5.0 final release in a couple of weeks.

Thanks,
Peter Johnson and the other Yasm developers
<peter at tortall.net>

Yasm development discussion is at <yasm-devel at tortall.net>.