[yasm-announce] ANNC: Yasm 0.5.0rc1 (Release Candidate 1)

[Peter Johnson]

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Yasm 0.5.0rc1, the first 
release candidate for the fifth milestone release of the Yasm Modular 
Assembler.  The purpose of this release is to shake down some bugs 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 0.4.0) 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 0.5.0rc1:

http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/wiki/Release0.5.0rc1

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 month or so.

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

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