For those complaining about this, I finally found time and there were only three small bugs:

1. CLX requires recursive locks, but ECL now makes non-recursive the default. I fixed CLX in ECL.

2. Stumpwm uses the old ASDF-ECL building routines instead of the new and improved ASDF-BUNDLE which is standard and supported by ASDF (Faré).

3. Stumpwm's RELOAD kept a reference to ASDF which should not be there for standalone programs, since ASDF is not used in that case.... read more

Some highlights of this release are:

• Lots of bugs fixed.
• The MOP has been fixed to work with the upcoming release of Closer-MOP
• ECL now produces a much more readable C code, with indentation and more explicit declarations of variables.

See file src/CHANGELOG or browse it online

http://ecls.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ecls/ecl/src/CHANGELOG?view=markup

PS: If you read ECL news through Planet Lisp, please follow the links to the original page, https://sourceforge.net/p/ecls/news , because SF's news feed breaks all the beautiful formatting of its markup code.

Would you like to get acquainted with a Common Lisp implementation? Do you have free time and would like to start by some small tasks?

ECL is currently offering a simple way for you to do so. Thanks to Anton Vodonosov's cl-test-grid and Eric Marsden's benchmark collection, which are offered here http://ecls.sourceforge.net/reports-generated/ecl/index.html and here http://ecls.sourceforge.net/pictures/index_js.html , you may now see in real time what problems are left to be solved in terms both of compatibility and performance.... read more

I just saw a bunch of old news resurrected both in my news reader and in Planet Lisp. This was probably due to the software upgrade in Sourceforge: ECL is now using the new development platform that Sourceforge provides and during the migration several unexpected events took place (lost git repositories, this issue with the news, etc). Fortunately this new platform is easier to use, it provides http access to git, CVS is still there, bug reporting is much nicer and I can kill spam comments in bug reports, which is great. Please make the best use of it and accept once more my apologies for the zombie news.

ECL has been upgraded to the newest version of Sourceforge. Unfortunately this has lead to the loss of the code repositories, which had to be recreated and now have different addresses:

git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/ecls/ecl ecl # ECL source code
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/ecls/ecl-doc ecl-doc # ECL documentation

Go to http://www.sf.net/p/ecls to see the new project interface and the two GIT repositories, or simply check the new addresses in our downloads page http://ecls.sourceforge.net/download.html

Sorry for the multiple posting -- I had some problems with SourceForge news submission today.

Known issues

This release is the first one with the new multithreading library,
which no longer relies on the POSIX mutexes, condition variables and
semaphores. Instead, ECL makes use of libatomic-ops to implement
userspace routines for process communication (mailboxes), resource
sharing (locks, condition variables, counting semaphores) and fast
spinlocks.... read more

• Lots and lots of fixes.

See file src/CHANGELOG or browse it online

http://ecls.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ecls/ecl/src/CHANGELOG?view=markup

It seems that Windows now implements a kind of input history for any application that uses the console. This is nice, because it allows ECL users that directly work on a terminal window to recall previous commands, using just the arrow keys -- a limited form of what "readline" does for you --.

On a side note, the next release of ECL will ship with a small script to install quicklisp in the installation directory. It will be as simple as using (require :ecl-quicklisp) from the Common Lisp prompt. ECL will download the installation file and run it for you with the appropriate paths.

ECL's manual, which is found here http://ecls.sourceforge.net/new-manual/ is being updated on two fronts. The most important part is to document features that were long present but were not explained in the documentation. This includes for instance character types, support for Unicode or external formats, which were erroneously absent from the manual for several years.

The second set of improvements consists on the documentation of its C/C++ API. The manual now lists the C equivalents of almost all Standard Common Lisp functions and types, and in the following days we will add also the functions and macros which are proper just to the C part, such as conversion from all C types to Lisp and back, memory allocation, etc.

Today or tomorrow I will upload a set of changes that will make ECL build with support for threads by default. If you want a single-threaded ECL, use "--disable-threads" when configuring it.

On a completely different matter, thanks to user contributed patches, ECL now seems to build in 64 bit mode using Visual Studio C++ (express) or Microsoft's SDK for Windows v7.1 (free).