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[ANN] ECL 9.12.1

Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 2:17 am
by jjgarcia
Announcement of ECL
===================

ECL stands for Embeddable Common-Lisp. The ECL project aims to produce an
implementation of the Common-Lisp language which complies to the ANSI X3J13
definition of the language.

The term embeddable refers to the fact that ECL includes a lisp to C compiler,
which produces libraries (static or dynamic) that can be called from C
programs. Furthermore, ECL can produce standalone executables from your lisp
code and can itself be linked to your programs as a shared library.

ECL supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris (at
least v. 9), Microsoft Windows and OSX, running on top of the Intel, Sparc,
Alpha and PowerPC processors. Porting to other architectures should be rather
easy.

ECL is currently hosted at Common-Lisp.net and SourceForge. The home page of
the project is http://ecls.sourceforge.net, and in it you will find source code
releases, a CVS tree and some useful documentation.

Known issues
============

- The Mingw port does not work with the stable version of the Boehm-Weiser
garbage collector. Users will have to download a more recent version and
build and install it in an accessible location for ECL to compile.

- The OpenBSD port does not support multithreaded builds because the latest
stable version that runs on it does not contain all the required
functionality.

- --with-cxx is currently broken and ECL does not BUILD with a C++ compiler,
but it can still be USED in C++ programs.

ECL 9.12.1:
===========

* Platform support:

- Support for Itanium.

- Support for Solaris and SunStudio compiler.

- Support for Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 10 beta.

- Support for Cygwin.

* Visible changes:

- New function EXT:ARRAY-RAW-DATA returns a non-adjustable vector of type
(UNSIGNED-BYTE 8) with the content of an array. The returned array overlaps
with the original, so any change on one will affect the other.

- LOAD works on special files (/dev/null and the like).

- New command line option --version outputs the version number preceded
by the implementation name ("ECL 9.11.1" in this particular release).

- MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND is optimally replaced with a LET form when the number
of variables is 1.

- ECL now accepts Windows' UNC pathnames.
(with-open-file (s #P"//JUANJO-IMAC/Public Folder/index.html"
:direction :input)
(loop for l = (read-line s nil nil)
while l
do (princ l)))

- The default memory limits are increased up to 512Mb for 32 bit images and
4Gb for 64-bits systems.

- The bignums generated by RANDOM did not contain enough random bits.

* Bugs fixed:

- In single-threaded builds, ECL did not properly restore the signal mask
before jumping out of a signal handler.

- Floating point exceptions were sometimes ignored, leading to infinite loops.

- A new configuration flag is added, --with-dffi. This flag allows
deactivating the foreign function interface when the compiler does not
support inline assembly with the GCC syntax and libffi is not available.

- In a multithreaded ECL, when handling a Ctr-C/SIGINT asynchronous interrupt,
the CONTINUE restart was not always available.

- In cygwin, LOAD was unable to load and execute binary files.

- In cygwin, FASL files can not lack a file extension, because dlopen()
then looks for a file ending in ".dll" and fails.

- In cygwin, files that are dlopen'ed must have executable permissions.

- ECL ignored the IGNORABLE declaration.

- The IGNORE/IGNORABLE declarations accept (but ignore) arguments of the
for (FUNCTION function-name).

- SUBTYPEP caused a SIGSEGV when the input was a not finalized class.

- Due to the SUBTYPEP bug, ECL could not compile DEFMETHOD forms whose
arguments referenced non-finalized classes

- When supplied an error value, (EXT:SAFE-EVAL form env &optional err-value)
never returned the output of the evaluated form.

- FIND-SYMBOL accepted string designators instead of just strings, as
mandated by the ANSI specification.

- APPEND copied also the last argument.

- (LOG #C(x x)) now produces a better result when x == 0

- (ATAN #C(0.0 1.0)) no longer produces an infinite recursion.

- Solved a hard to hit bug in DEFCLASS's routine for detecting collisions in
slot names

- LOG and LOG1P did not work properly with NaNs under linux.

- ECL had problems combining #. and #n=/#n# reader macros.

- FDEFINITION and SYMBOL-FUNCTION caused an incorrect error condition when
acting on NIL.

- The optimizer for TYPEP did not work when passed three arguments.

* Clos:

- CLOS:SET-FUNCALLABLE-INSTANCE-FUNCTION broke the value if SI:INSTANCE-SIG,
preventing any further access to the instance slots.

- The optimized slot accessors check that the instances are up to date.

- The use of MAKE-INSTANCES-OBSOLETE now forces UPDATE-INSTANCE-FOR-REDEFINED-CLASS
to be invoked even if the slots did not change.

- ENSURE-GENERIC-FUNCTION-USING-CLASS does not provide a default method class.

* Sockets:

- The socket option TCP_NODELAY option has been fixed: it was improperly using
the socket interface SOL_SOCKET instead of IPPROTO_TCP (Chun Tian)

- sockopt-linger and (setf sockopt-linger) now work as they should, using
the struct linger argument (M. Mondor)

* ASDF:

- ASDF:MAKE-BUILD now accepts also a :PROLOGUE-CODE argument with code to
be executed before all lisp files are run.

- C:BUILDER's argument :PROLOGUE-CODE can now be a lisp form. In the case of
standalone programs the prologue code is always executed after cl_boot() has
been invoked.

- QUIT did not work from standalone executables created with neither ASDF
nor with C:BUILDER.

[ANN] ECL 9.12.2

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 9:24 am
by jjgarcia
ECL 9.12.2:
===========

* Bugs fixed:

- RANDOM broken on 64-bits architectures.

- The debugger now shows the package names of inspected variables.

- The code in CLX that dealt with interrupts had become outdated.

* Other changes:

- Methods now show up in the debugger with their original name.

- Enlarged the string buffers used for reading and parsing lisp data.

As usual, available at http://ecls.sourceforge.net