Free the X3J Thirteen!

A monthly summary of Free ("as in Freedom") CL Hackery news-that-I-know-about. January 2002

This month: CL-PDF, new releases of SBCL, OpenMCL, GCL. SBCL SPARC working, PPC almost working. CMUCL release imminent, MP and FFI improvements to follow. Queries in LISA

For submission information, see the bottom of the page

SBCL

0.7 and 0.7.1

January 2002 saw the long-awaited release of SBCL 0.7, and hot on its heels the bug-fix 0.7.1 version

compiler changes:
- SBCL is now essentially a compiler-only implementation of ANSI Common Lisp. EVAL is now mostly done by creating a LAMBDA expression, calling COMPILE on it, then calling FUNCALL on the result.
- The EVAL-WHEN code has been rewritten to be ANSI-compliant
- There are new compiler optimizations for various sequence and maths functions
major incompatible change: The default fasl file extension has changed to ".fasl", for all architectures. The fasl file version number has also been updated
many many other bug fixes
better system self-test scripts
The doc/cmucl/ directory, containing old CMU CL documentation from the time of the fork, is no longer part of the base system.

For more detail, see the change log in CVS (most recent changes at the bottom)

Related Projects

New versions of all of net.sbcl.sockets, the SBCL CLX port, langband, and db-sockets are available which work with SBCL 0.7.x

Where next? PPC and SPARC, SBCL 1.0

The PPC and SPARC ports both announced significant milestones this month: SPARC successfully passes tests and compiles itself, and PPC passes tests and nearly compiles itself. They still need forward porting to 0.7.x, but it's likely that both of these will be showing up in SBCL in the near future.

In a sbcl-devel article, William Newman describes his tentative plans for 1.0 (mostly better CLOS integration).

CMUCL

CMUCL 18d is imminent, if it has not already been released by the time you see this. Look out for

Numerous ANSI compliance and bug fixes
Better disassembly listings on x86 and SPARC
Substantial speed improvements
New rebuilding procedure
Incompatible fasl files: old code needs recompiling

Anonymous CVS

With the return of anonymous access to the CVS repository, the CMUCL infrastructure is (I believe) once again fully operational.

Post-18d

The cmucl-imp mailing list has seen a lot of activity lately. Changes that may go into a post-18d release include

prospective FFI changes: simpler callbacks
MP improvements, which benefit Portable Allegroserve among others
- processes can have run reasons and arrest reasons which provide additional flexibility in scheduling;
- arguments can be passed to wait functions
- Initial special bindings can be specified for processes
- Processes have a property list
Foreign linkage changes: "The goal is to be able to save cores that contain references to foreign code and data in shared libraries and which may not be at the same address at dump time and run time." This also adds support for foreign loading .so files on FreeBSD.

OpenMCL 0.10.1

OpenMCL 0.10 and 0.10.1 (bugfix release) were both announced this month. The major news is that

OpenMCL now supports Darwin (the operating system that MacOS X is based on)
Available reports at this time indicate that there has not been a change to the interface database. Maybe they've run out of dbm implementations ;-)

For more information, see the http://openmcl.clozure.com/Distributions/openmcl-release-0.10.1.html release notes

CL-PDF

CL-PDF is a Common Lisp PDF Library for generating PDF files.

(pdf:with-document ()
    (pdf:with-page ()
      (let ((helvetica (make-instance 'pdf:font)))
 (pdf:add-fonts-to-page helvetica)
 (pdf:in-text-mode
  (pdf:set-font helvetica 36.0)
  (pdf:move-text 100 800)
  (pdf:draw-text "cl-pdf: Example 1"))
 (pdf:translate 230 500)
 (loop repeat 101
       for i = 0.67 then (* i 1.045)
       do (pdf:in-text-mode
    (pdf:set-font helvetica i)
    (pdf:move-text (* i 3) 0)
    (pdf:draw-text "rotation"))
       (pdf:rotate 18))))
    (pdf:write-document file))

gives this. The author Marc Battyani is looking for help with several subprojects and possible related projects, and suggests that some of them may even be suitable for programmers new to CL as learning experiences.

LISA

David Young reports that he has "finished an experimental implementation of Queries for LISA, and will be making a release sometime soon (after I complete documentation for the feature). "

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=143161

GCL

GCL 2.4.1 has been released. Release notes are unavailable, but the changes seem to be mostly concerned with portability and fixes to the build procedure.

New packages in cCLan


**  cl-db-sockets - A Common Lisp interface to the BSD sockets API

 cl-db-sockets (0.53) unstable; urgency=low

   * fixed some fairly-obvious-in-retrospect socket-accept bugs
   * New upstream; see NEWS file
   * documentation updates
   * really silly bug in make-instance fixed
   * works with CMUCL again
   * Supports TCP_NODELAY socket option

**  cl-imho    - Common Lisp web development framework
**  libapache-mod-webapp - IMHO web server connector for Apache

 cl-imho (1.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

   * new upstream version
   * update policy to 3.5.6 (no changes needed)
   * package name changed to cl-imho, there's already an 'imho' package
   * cl-imho is binary-indep; it conflicts with onshore-imho package (old
     pkg from cclan); depends on cl-odcl
   * remove spurious build-depends on libc6-dev; improve package
     descriptions; changed maintainer and added uploaders
   * split out libapache-mod-webapp package for the Apache DSO;
     the cl-imho package recommends this one
   * many thanks to Rahul Jain for patches and suggestions
   * libapache-mod-webapp is incompatible with apache 2.0
   * include HTML and ASCII versions of the documentation


**  cl-odcl    - onShore Development Common Lisp utilities

 cl-odcl (1.1.2-1) unstable; urgency=low

   * new upstream version


**  cl-metadata - Simple metadata system built atop UncommonSQL
**  cl-uncommonsql - Commmon Lisp database access kit
**  cl-uncommonsql-mysql - UncommonSQL database backend, MySQL
**  cl-uncommonsql-oracle - UncommonSQL database backend, Oracle
**  cl-uncommonsql-postgresql - UncommonSQL database backend, PostgreSQL

 cl-uncommonsql (1.1.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

   * new upstream version
   * do away with the use of /usr/share/common-lisp/repositories and
     symlinks into that; instead put the files right in
     /usr/share/common-lisp/source where we need them -- well, actually, we
     use /usr/share/common-lisp/source/uncommonsql-
   * cl-uncommonsql doesn't need to include sql/metadata.lisp, that is in
     cl-metadata
   * build-depends should have been build-depends-indep
   * debian/rules: fix some typos; compile the database backend packages at
     install time, since the user won't be able to compile them at load
     time (unless he's root); to do this, we take the system.lisp files,
     remove the mk:oos, and install that as a .system file; thanks to
     Matthew Danish; closes
     http://prep.onshored.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2958 and
     http://prep.onshored.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2950
   * install upstream changelogs


**  ilisp      - Package for interacting with LISPs using EMACSes

 ilisp (5.11.1-5cCLan3) unstable; urgency=low

   * More SBCL updates (should work in all sbcl/emacs versions)


**  langband-engine - The Langband engine
**  langband-vanilla - A Vanilla-Angband plugin to the langband-engine
**  langband-zterm - The Langband term-libs

 langband (0.0.18-1) unstable; urgency=low

   * Upstream release, see upstream Changelogs.


**  openmcl    - OpenMCL Common Lisp compiler

 openmcl (0.10.1-0csr1) unstable; urgency=low

   * New upstream.


**  sbcl       - Steel Bank Common Lisp, a fork from CMUCL

 sbcl (0.7.0-0csr1) unstable; urgency=low

   * New upstream. One or two packaging tweaks.

Submissions

"Free The X3J Thirteen" is compiled once a month by me (Daniel Barlow) from news that I know about. If you're associated with a free CL project that's under-represented here, all you have to do is send me news so that I know about it. Email me! I'd especially like to hear news from CLISP and OpenMCL people because I don't often have time to follow that myself

Common Lisp: not bad for a dead language