Release 0.8.14

Gauche 0.8.14 is available.

 http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/

This release is to flush out cumulative bug fixes and small
improvements.  Nothing particularly shiny, but the performance is
also slightly improved, so you might want to upgrade.

In SVN trunk there's a module parser.peg, a parser combinator library
for parsing expression grammar.   It is NOT included in this release.
I want it be the default choice of the parser of Gauche, and not
satisfied by the current implementation.  You may try it from svn,
but be aware that the API will be changed a lot in future.

Some suggested changes are not incorporated due to the lack of
the time of testing, including Tomas Stanek's suggestion of using
USE_MMAP in GC.

It's been over 4 years since Gauche reached 0.8.  It's not that
the development is slowed down; in fact a lot of code has been
added or rewritten since then.  These days I get more and more
opportunities to use Gauche in real work, and keep adding
stuff that are required in the production environment.  During
the course, I started to feel to adjust the original plan 
a little bit, though.

Originally I wanted to fix C ABI by 0.9, so that after 1.0 you
don't need to recompile every extensions for each new release
of Gauche.  However the goal seems further than I thought, mainly
because improvements in various parts (including VM) tend to
require API change.  I also start to think that it won't be
that bad to recompile extensions, for the job can be largely
automated by clever package management system.

On the other hand, from the production application I feel the
need to work more on the domain of debugging, performance tuning,
and better deployment machinery.

So I decided to put off C ABI fix after 1.0; I aim at releasing
0.9 as the wrap up of all those extensions of 0.8.x series,
then start concentrating more on the 'production friendly'
region.  Well it's just a plan so I might adjust it again, but
this is what I have in mind currently.

--shiro

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