I think I must have been busy lately#

Fri, 28 Mar 2003 00:22:26 +0000

I think I must have been busy lately. I just can't remember much of what I've been doing.

Not that this is the problem that keeping an online diary is supposed to solve, or anything. Oh well. Speaking of online diaries, Is the active user-base of Advogato incompetent? Well, yes. I was going to post a followup saying "I used to hesitate before posting Advogato articles because they'd get taken apart by knowledgeable people, but now I don't bother to post them at all because they get taken apart by people who just don't have a clue." But then I realised that it would get taken apart by people who just don't have a clue. As Mark Jason Dominus said, "Forget what I said about the damn iterator pattern, already"

06:54:53 <Krystof> so the big question is: "what does the next
version get called?"
06:55:07 <Krystof> 0.7.14.1? 0.8.0pre.1?
06:57:10 <Krystof> (well, maybe that's not the big question)
06:59:16 <wnewman> I haven't noticed any response to my mention of
0.8.0 on the mailing list, so it seems to be only you and I who care.
07:00:40 <wnewman> If the SB-PCL:CLASS stuff lands, and Dan either
puts in threads or doesn't care, it's OK with me if the next release
is 0.8.0, and it's ok with me if it takes more than a month.
07:00:40 <wnewman> which hopefully gives everyone concerned enough
leeway

New SBCL (0.7.14) was released on Monday, and was probably notable chiefly for being, as you see here, the last release before 0.8. Unless you're using bit vectors, in which case you could get some kind of 100x speedup, which I think is worth noting. 0.8 will have better PCL integration, and (experimental probably-not-enabled-by-default) native threads on x86 Linux. Yes, that's right, it's merge time. Mostly this is an exercise in arranging the source such that threaded and unithread sbcl can be built from the same code base, and (for bonus points) that the code in question is reasonably free of Weapons of Mass #define

Also London and Oxford meetings of (minimally overlapping) subsets of the UK-Lispers list. At (or arguably, after) the latter of these, Christophe fixed SXHASH on PPC, so it no longer returns 0 for symbols whose names are less than 4 characters long.

Started cycling again last weekend, for the first time since, um, last August. The saddle on my bike is less comfortable than I remembered it as having been, but I expect I'll get used to it again.