Finally, I can go back to drawing ponies out on the bridge by the old 
reservoir...

** FOR THE ADVENTUROUS -- FOR TESTING ODYSSEYS ONLY **

Syck 0.50 is here!!  Believe me when I say that this is the most 
incredible day of your life!!  Consider the months I've spent slaving 
away, rethinking and reshaping our little YAML engine...

And today, all the tests passed and I rode my speedboat right through a 
tunnel, screaming at the top of my lungs.

---

The new Syck is much faster than before and we're closing in on 
Marshal.  The following benchmark illustrates loading and dumping of a 
700k file.

  Marshal:
  real    0m0.053s
  user    0m0.041s
  sys     0m0.007s

  Syck 0.45:
  real    0m0.271s
  user    0m0.259s
  sys     0m0.006s

  Syck 0.50:
  real    0m0.094s
  user    0m0.086s
  sys     0m0.003s

In my testing, it's common to see a 4x speed increase on outputting YAML.

Although this release is less stable than Syck 0.45, the core of Syck is 
fully unit-tested and I am actively working to find and crush memory 
leaks and segfaults.  If you have the means to assist in this work, I'd 
appreciate any stress testing scripts and stacktraces you can contribute.

This release marks the end of major API changes.  I don't think anything 
will change in syck.h until a 1.0 release.  This means the focus can be 
on (1) debugging every corner of the library and (2) ensuring 
interoperability between the PHP, Python and Ruby extensions.

Well, good enough.  Beaver tales,

_why