Dear XOTcl Community,

XOTcl 1.5.5 is available. The main change is to achieve binary compatibility
between Tcl 8.5 and XOTcl compiled with Tcl 8.4. This is essential achieved
through a small emulation layer based on C-structures that will be available
in Tcl 8.5.

best regards
-gustaf neumann

Announcing XOTcl 1.5.5
*************************

We are pleased to announce the availability of XOTcl 1.5.5.

Major changes relative to 1.5.4 are:

    * Improved binary compatibility: 

      It is now possible to load XOTcl compiled for Tcl 8.4 
      into a tclsh8.5 (again, substantial change).

      One can now test now 4 versions:
      a) a native version for Tcl 8.4 (without compatibility layer)
      b) a native version for Tcl 8.5
      c) a version compiled for Tcl 8.4 with compatibility layer in tclsh8.4
      d) a version compiled for Tcl 8.4 with compatibility layer in tclsh8.5 

      Tests showed that the overhead is for the compatibility
      layer is between 1.1% and 2.3%, the difference between 
      tcl8.5 and tcl8.4 is much larger.

      The forward compatibility behavior behavior can be turned off by setting 
      FORWARD_COMPATIBLE to 0 during compilation (xotcl.h) to get
      a small performance improvement.


 For more details about the changes, please consult the ChangeLog and
 documentation.

MORE INFO
  General and more detailed information about XOTcl and its components
  can be found at http://www.xotcl.org

