Qore 0.8.0 has been released along with all updated modules; modules have in most cases been updated to take advantage new APIs (mostly regarding typing, date/time improvements, and new Datasource/DatasourcePool methods).
There was a slight delay before the 0.8.0 release to improve the type system; now the type system is internally capable of supporting very flexible types, where one or more types are accepted and one or more types are returned, making types such as "nothing or string" possible to implement internally.
However Qore's user type declaration support in the parser and the function and class library were not updated to take advantage of the new flexible typing support, as everything was stable and tested and applying the new support for more flexible typing would delay the release by probably a month or two, but at least the internal changes were in place and are a part of the Qore library's API and ABI.
One of the coolest new developments to make use of Qore's new typing support is the new qt4 module, which allows Qore code to implement sophisticated platform-independent QT4-based GUIs (note that the qt4 module does take advantage of Qore's new flexible type system, allowing NOTHING to be passed for some classes to simulate a NULL pointer, for example).
Here are some things to expect in future releases of Qore: implicit typing and other parser improvements (0.8.0 is a great improvement in this area already), improved execution speed, and SMP scalability. And most interestingly JIT compilation support using the LLVM project. This is the most exciting part of future development of Qore that once again should take the Qore language to another level. I am astounded at what an awesome project LLVM is; how well documented it is, how well supported and active it is, what it can do and what a language designer can do with it. This will take some time, but will be some of the most interesting work to date done with Qore, and the results should be nothing short of amazing.
I wish I could give a timeline for any of these new developments, but I cannot; they will be done as time permits.
