You'll be happy to know (I hope) that Epoch is far from dead. There may be a bumpy period of adjustment as I settle in to the new job and figure out exactly what kind of spare time I have available, but I fully intend to continue working on the language as much as I can.
In fact, over the past few days, I've used some of my downtime to great effect, and fixed a couple of lingering bugs and gotchas in the compiler and VM. It remains to be seen whether or not I'll be able to get Release 11 out in the next few days before I start work, but I'm certainly pushing in that direction.
One thing I started on early that I wasn't necessarily planning on doing until much later is the debug hooks in the VM. This currently is limited to taking snapshots of the active pool of string variables in memory for a running Epoch program (which I used to help fix a problem in the way string handles were allocated in long-running programs) but there will be additional functionality later on. The idea is that this set of hooks can be used directly from the Era IDE to provide full interactive debugging of Epoch software from within the IDE itself. Right now it's all a bit hacky and ugly, but as time goes on things should get much more fluid and cool.
R11 consists of a huge number of small fixes and improvements; I will compile a full list from the official bug database for the release notes. I'd mention some highlights here but I frankly can't remember half of what went into the release at this point, so if you're really all that curious, head over to epoch-language.googlecode.com and check out the issue tracker for a list of stuff tagged for shipping in R11.
For now, I think I'll take the rest of today to work on various bits of random coolness and polish, and then put together the final release tomorrow. That should keep me busy until I officially move into my new apartment on Saturday... and then of course I start work Monday, so that caps off my week rather nicely while leaving a day in there to relax one last time before going back to the grind.
More updates as things develop!
