I have finally released Poly/ML 5.5 on the SourceForge site. I still need to finish the release notes and update the Poly/ML web site. The major change is of course the complete rewrite of the storage management with the garbage-collector now parallelised. In testing the GC sharing pass made a dramatic difference to large Isabelle examples. It would be interesting to know if this makes a difference to other examples.
Other major changes are:
PolyML.shareCommonData has been parallelised and improved.
Support for 64-bit under Windows (Visual Studio or mingw).
Object files now use standard "text" and "data" areas when exporting. In particular this means that it is no longer necessary to use --segprot on Mac OS X to avoid a bus error.
Libffi is used for the foreign-function interface (CInterface structure). In particular this means that the full range of data types are supported on X86/64.
Support for native code on PPC and Sparc has been withdrawn.
There are quite a few other minor changes and bug fixes.
David