diary at Telent Netowrks

SBCL 0.8.21, as announced on cl.l#

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:04:27 +0000

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, notably the PROG2 issue which has been with us seemingly forever)

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

- PROG2 returns the primary value of its first argument, as per ANSI - (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.

Some brief feedback on my weekend in Amsterdam#

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 10:56:24 +0000

Some brief feedback on my weekend in Amsterdam.

In summary, then: