[ANN] Ravi (a Lua 5.3 dialect) 1.0 Beta-2 Release with LLVM 8 and Eclipse OMR JIT compilation support

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

Ravi (http://ravilang.org) is a dialect of Lua 5.3 with LLVM and
Eclipse OMR based JIT compilers and limited optional static typing. I
am pleased to announce that the 1.0 Beta-2 release of Ravi is now
available. Additionally, work is ongoing to create a distribution of
Ravi that includes a selection of high quality third-party libraries
(https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/Suravi).

This release is aligned with Lua 5.3.5.

The main highlights of this release are:

* Support for LLVM 8.0.1 has been added. Note that Ravi is compatible
with LLVM versions 3.5 and above, except for LLVM 7.0 which has not
been tested
* The LLVM backend can now switch between the hand-coded LLVM IR and
IR generated via a C front-end. The support for C IR generator makes
it easier to experiment with code generation strategies in the future.

* The alternative JIT backend based on a customized version of Eclipse
OMR (https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/nj) is also available.

For general information regarding Ravi please visit:
* https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi
* https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/Suravi

All feedback welcome!

Thanks and Regards
Dibyendu