Dear Community,

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Next Scripting
Framework (NSF) 2.4.0. The changes are mostly perfective improvements
in terms of bug fixes, API consistency, and backwards
compatibility. See below for the details.


Diff stats since 2.3.0:
   YYY

Major changes relative to 2.3.0 are: NSF now compiles and runs with
Tcl 9 (core.tcl-lang.org/tcl main branch at the time of
writing). Otherwise, this is a maintenance and bug-fix release.

New Features

- NSF:

  * ...

- NX:

  * ...
  
- XOTcl:

  * dict is now available as a per-object method, similar to array.

- MongoDB:

  * ...
  * Fixed test test case for gridfs and file renamings
  * Tested the NSF MongoDB binding against latest
    stable releases of MongoDB (5.0.9) and
    MongoDB-C driver (1.22.1).


- Documentation:

  * ...
  
- Maintenance & bug fixes:

  * Prefer using Tcl_InterpDeleted() over explicitly checking bitmask
    flags internal to Tcl.

  * Exiting non-threaded NSF builds will not hang anymore.

  * Fix crashes due internal cache mis-management of flag names
    processed by configure/ cget. See
    https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.tcl/c/F9cn_Ah4js4/m/eL22xbQaCgAJ

  * Tcl 8.7:

    o Support for the Tcl 8.7a5 release
    (core.tcl-lang.org/tcl branch "core-8-branch"). NSF compiles and its
    regression tests execute successfully (including TCL_NO_DEPRECATE).

    o NSF is now TIP-538 ready (Tcl starting relying on on libtommath
    as an extrinsic dependency).

  * Tcl 9: For the first time, NSF now compiles and its test suite
    completes with Tcl 9. Kudos to Jan Njitmans and Gustaf Neumann.

  * Misc (esp. NSF/C): Ran valgrind checks ...

- Build environments, automated builds:

  * Render makefile more robust in light of filepaths containing
    whitespace characters
  
  * Due to Travis becoming unavailable, we moved to GitHub Actions for
    automated builds on Linux and macOS. Windows builds are still
    served by AppVeyor.

The detailed changelog is available at
https://next-scripting.org/xowiki/download/file/ChangeLog-2.3.0-2.4.0.log

The Next Scripting Framework 2.4.0 (containing NX 2.4.0 and XOTcl
2.4.0) can be obtained from https://next-scripting.org/. Please report
issues and wishes by opening a ticket at
https://sourceforge.net/p/next-scripting/tickets/.

Best regards
- Gustaf Neumann
- Stefan Sobernig