SBCL 0.8.21, as announced on cl.l#

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 16:04:27 +0100

SBCL 0.8.21, as announced on cl.l. last Friday. Emphasis added since:

The Steel Bank Common Lisp development team is proud to announce the
release of SBCL 0.8.21.  This release marks the beginning of a period
of stabilisation towards 0.9 and eventually 1.0, as well as the usual
crop of bug fixes (some of them quite long-standing, <b>notably the PROG2
issue which has been with us seemingly forever</b>)

SBCL is an Open Source compiler and runtime system for ANSI Common
Lisp. It provides an interactive environment including an integrated
native compiler, a debugger, and many extensions.


* Notable changes

** Now possible to set global optimization policy, startup package,
   readtable, etc, in startup files, as they're read with READ and
   EVAL instead of LOAD as before

** debugger changes
  - less mess in backtraces
  - removed redundant TOPLEVEL restart 
  - many kinds of functions have more legible printed representation
    and are more amenable INSPECT.
  - SIGSEGV in foreign code handled more gracefully on x86 and x86-64
  
** Improved SB-INTROSPECT for needs of SLIME

** thread support for non-NPTL systems has been removed - locking
   is buggy and unreliable.  A threaded SBCL build will now warn at
   startup and refuse to create new threads, unless futex support 
   is detected in the kernel

** Updates to the x86-64 backend

** Many bug fixes

  - <b>PROG2 returns the primary value of its first argument, as per ANSI</b>
  - (TYPEP X '(MEMBER ...)) no longer returns a list in compiled code
  - LOAD binds *LOAD-PATHNAME* to the merged pathname
  - more bugs revealed by Paul Dietz' test suite: check the NEWS file
    for details

* For more information and downloads

   http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html

The sources will compile under almost any sufficiently-ANSI CL, or you
can wait for binaries which are currently being uploaded for various
platforms.

A total of one person spotted this and thought it unusual enough to ask about. Next year our April Fool will be less subtle, I promise.