A monthly summary of Free ("as in Freedom") CL Hackery news-that-I-know-about. February 2002
This month:
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A new vendor-neutral (i.e. not Debian-dependent) package format was proposed for cCLan, and a system-definition tool and shell scripts to install an archive node implemented to demonstrate the concept. In response to feedback from non-users of cCLan, the new system is based on tar files and standard unix tools.
If you have a well-connected computer with perl, rsync and standard Unix tools, and are interesting in joining it to the new cCLan network (currently two and a half machines big), look at http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/12820/0/7981131/ and http://cclan.sourceforge.net/debian/experimental/cclan/doc/NEW-NODE, and then join the cclan-list and announce your interest. The actual archive contents right now are dummy files: this is a work in progress
The system definition utility involved is asdf, originally written last summer as a protest against the (lack of) portability of mk-defsystem 3, and since enhanced for this purpose. asdf is also distinguished from defsystem 3 by having a published interface to the system objects so that users may extend or write new operations and components for their purposes, and is billed as "mostly ready for use". The author (me, yes) believes it's stable for straightforward uses, but may still see changes to the protocol for extending operations, as we learn through trying it ourselves. Syntax is mostly mk-defsystem compatible; it typically takes a few minutes to convert a straightforward mk defsystem.
This month also saw a flurry of commits to the new mk-defsystem 4 in CLOCC. I havent yet seen an announcement for the new version, but that will no doubt be forthcoming when it's ready.
CLAWK "contains the implementation of a fair bit of the interesting bits of AWK", the pattern scanning language popular^Wwidely used on Unix systems. The regex parser is also available for standalone use, for people who just need that bit.
The author says
If you're one of those who believe that Lisp is slow, note that this regex engine is roughly 1.2x-1.5 times as fast than the GNU regex matcher (written in C). And the latest matching engine (not yet incorporated into CLAWK) is faster still (currently about 2x faster than GNU regex, and I suspect the next round of tweaks will push it to 3-4x).
The CL Cookbook is a collaborative project that aims to provide for Common Lisp something similar to the Perl Cookbook published by O'Reilly. Announced early in February, they appear to have made substantial headway already at covering some of the parts of CL that the books don't talk about.
The SBCL SPARC port is now in the main CVS tree. If you have a machine running SPARC Linux you should be able to check out the CVS and build SBCL for it. The SBCL PPC port, on the other hand, is in the same state as it was last month.
Some problems with the Alpha SBCL port seem to have been solved by the Debian maintainers; it looks as though Debian Woody (imminent) will have SBCL for both architectures.
CLISP is now in testing for a 2.28 release. Sam Steingold writes on clisp-list
There will be _NO_ release until I get confirmation from the users that the current CVS CLISP compiles out of the box on at least win32 and Solaris.
18d is still imminent, so I will not be announcing it again until it has happened. Recent changes discussed on the CMUCL mailing lists are for FreeBSD and Alpha/Tru64 dynamic loading.
** ilisp - Package for interacting with LISPs using EMACSes ilisp (5.11.1-5cCLan4) unstable; urgency=low * OpenMCL and hyperspec updates; * Depend on common-lisp-controller, incidentally fixing Debian "serious" bug #129980. ** langband-engine - The Langband engine ** langband-vanilla - A Vanilla-Angband plugin to the langband-engine ** langband-zterm - The Langband term-libs langband (0.0.19-1) unstable; urgency=low * New upstream release, see upstream Changelogs. ** openmcl - Native code ANSI Common Lisp compiler and runtime environment openmcl (0.10.1-0csr2) unstable; urgency=low * Added README.Bootstrap to explain building procedure
"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