Early Customer Access Program (ECAP)

Welcome

Starting 2-3 months before each major release, Instantiations' ECAP provides pre-release versions^[1] of the VAST Platform.

These pre-release versions give customers the opportuntity to check out new features and provide their feedback to our engineering team before the next release.

^[1] Pre-release versions are snapshots of internal builds that are a work-in-progress. They may, or may not, be fully functional and are not intended for use in production systems.

Get Started

If you are a VAST Platform customer with an active support plan, you already have access and can begin downloading the pre-release software now!

If you are not a customer just yet, we want to welcome you and ask that you check out the following links below:

• Registering for a free trial version of the latest product release
• Purchasing the product

Current ECAP Downloads

VAST Platform 2021 (v10.0.0) Pre-Release Builds are zero-install distributions (no installation or modifications to the system required)
providing new 32-bit and 64-bit virtual machines coupled with the latest Smalltalk images for our upcoming release.

This ECAP release for VAST 2021 (v10.0.0) includes:

• Migration to LLVM 10 compiler toolchain resulting in performance increase of 10% across the board
• Cross-platform OsProcess framework
• Futures/Promises asynchronous framework
• Bytecode analysis engine for improved type reconstruction
• Method type annotations to augment code assist tooling
• Brace array syntax extensions
• IBM MQ series SSL/TLS support and 64-bit updates
• Enhanced walkback generator
• Improved SMTP handling of different server configurations and edge cases
• Many socket framework enhancements and fixes
• New EsTimedWait, a high-resolution timer in the base product
• New EsSecureRandom, a secure random number generator in the base product
• And more...see the full list

Instructions

Download

1. Download the VAST Platform ECAP Distribution from the link found in the table above.
2. Unzip the downloaded file. This will produce the ECAP Distribution directory.
3. Please refer to the _USAGE.TXT file found in the ECAP Distribution directory for direction on how to run the product.
4. Please refer to the _CHANGELOG.TXT file found in the ECAP Distribution directory for a listing of notable changes/limitations by version.
5. Please refer to the _VERSION.TXT file found in the ECAP Distribution directory for a listing of version information.

Reporting an Issue

To report an issue with an ECAP build, please email the following information to ecap-support@instantiations.com.

• ECAP Build #
• Image Build # (i.e. [System imageBuildNumber asString])
• Operating System Version
• Impacts 32-bit, 64-bit, both?
• VA Debugger Stack Trace Attached (Yes/No)^[1]
• Description of the problem
• Steps to reproduce the problem
• Detailed error messages
• Walkback logs and code samples as appropriate

^[1] If applicable, select Stack or Copy Stack or Trace Text in the VA Debugger to generate the Stack Trace.