[Sbcl-announce] sbcl-1.1.8 released

[Christophe R. <cs...@ca...>]

Dear all,

Thanks to those who responded to my call for testing.  I took the
opportunity to do a live release of sbcl-1.1.8 at the European Common
Lisp Meeting, perhaps a little bit ahead of schedule; worthy of note
this month, as well as the particularly large number of changes, is that
several of them are from new contributors.  The excitingly numerous
notes for this release are appended to this message.

Best wishes,

Christophe

changes in sbcl-1.1.8 relative to sbcl-1.1.7:
  * notice: The implementation of MAP-ALLOCATED-OBJECTS (the heart of
    ROOM, plus a few SB-INTROSPECT functions) has been completely
    rewritten; it may now exhibit different bugs than before.
  * new feature: minimal runtime/compiler intrastructure support for SSE
    SIMD values, as SB-EXT:SIMD-PACK. Enabled on x86-64 via the build-time
    feature :sb-simd-pack. This should enable intrinsics extensions as
    libraries, without patching SBCL itself. Thanks to Alexander Gavrilov
    for maintaining a branch for so long.
  * enhancement: RUN-PROGRAM supports a :DIRECTORY argument to set
    the working directory of the spawned process.
    (lp#791800) (patch by Matthias Benkard)
  * enhancement: boxed vectors (vectors of T or of FIXNUM) can now be
    stack-allocated on PPC.
  * enhancement: "fixed objects" can now be stack-allocated on PPC.
  * enhancement: WITH-PINNED-OBJECTS no longer conses on PPC/GENCGC.
  * enhancement: (sb-introspect:find-definition-sources-by-name x :vop) now
    also returns VOPs which do not translate any functions, and finds
    defoptimizer types ir2convert and stack-allocate-result.
  * enhancement: better type derivation for APPEND, NCONC, LIST.
    (lp#538957)
  * enhancement: MAP-ALLOCATED-OBJECTS (the heart of ROOM) now walks the
    heap in a manner similar to the GC rather than its previous ad-hoc
    scheme, and is therefore no less and possibly more accurate.
  * fixes and enhancements related to Unicode:
    ** the character database information has been updated to Unicode 6.2;
    ** support for canonical and compatibility decomposition of characters has
       been added, along with support for primary composition;
    ** support for Unicode normalization forms of strings (NFC, NFKC, NFD and
       NFKD) has been included;
    ** querying the character database for code points not defined by Unicode
       gives less wrong answers (lp#1178038, reported by Ken Harris)
  * enhancement: print intermediate evaluation results for some ASSERTed
    expressions. (lp#789497) (patch by Alexandra Barchunova)
  * enhancement: x86-64 disassemblies are annotated with unboxed constant
    values when there are references to (RIP-relative) unboxed constants.
  * bug fix: type derivation for LOG{AND,IOR,XOR} scales linearly instead
    of quadratically with the size of the input in the worst case.
    (lp#1096444)
  * bug fix: handle errors when initializing *default-pathname-defaults*,
    sb-ext:*runtime-pathname*, sb-ext:*posix-argv* on startup, like character
    decoding errors, or directories being deleted.
  * bug fix: Loading a core with a discontiguous dynamic space now correctly
    computes the amount of dynamic space used.
  * bug fix: disassembler missing ",8" on SHLD
  * bug fix: backtracing through INTERNAL-ERROR signal handlers on systems
    that provide an "invalid" stack frame link for the signal handler
    itself now use the saved-fp-and-pc mechanism to pick up from the stack
    frame in the interrupt (signal) context.  This is known to affect
    threaded FreeBSD/x86-64.
  * bug fix: some LOOP statements couldn't be compiled.
    (lp#1178989)
  * bug fix: sb-sequence:dosequence works on literal vectors.
  * bug fix: errors in generic arithmetic show the assembly routine's
    caller on x86 and x86-64. (lp#800343)
  * bug fix: Compile-time type errors should never result in COMPILE-FILE
    failure. (lp#943953)
  * bug fix: Known bad local calls do not cause strange failures when
    emitting or dumping code. (lp#504121)
  * bug fix: Multiply-inlined structure constructor don't cause IR2-time
    codegen errors: type checks are inserted as necessary. (lp#1177703)
  * bug fix: Unsigned modular arithmetic is correctly converted into signed
    modular arithemtic (mostly to exploit fixnum-width VOPs). (lp#1026634)
  * bug fix: a combination of inlined local function with &optional and
    recursion no longer causes undescriptive compiler errors. (lp#1180992)
  * bug fix: sub-word BOOLEAN alien types now disregard higher order bits
    when testing for non-zero-ness.
  * bug fix: (CONCATENATE 'null ...) no longer fails for generic sequences.
    (lp#1162301)
  * bug fix: Type mismatch for the value of conditional expressions are
    correctly reported when detected at compile-time, instead of complaining
    about a constant NIL (similar for non-EQ-comparable catch tags).
  * bug fix: Referring to INLINE global functions as values should not result
    in a compilation failure. (lp#1035721)
  * optimization: faster ISQRT on fixnums and small bignums
  * optimization: faster and smaller INTEGER-LENGTH on fixnums on x86-64.
  * optimization: On x86-64, the number of multi-byte NOP instructions used
    for code alignment is now always minimal.
  * optimization: On 64-bit targets, the compiler generates much faster
    code for type checks for types known at compile time that are smaller
    than (SIGNED-BYTE 64) or (UNSIGNED-BYTE 64) and larger than FIXNUM, and
    their COMPLEX variants.
  * optimization: On x86 targets, more uses of ALIEN-FUNCALL during cross
    compilation now inline the INVOKE-WITH-SAVED-FP-AND-PC dance.
  * optimization: ROOM no longer conses so egregiously on non-x86oid
    systems.
  * optimization: associative bitwise operations reassociate patterns like
    (f (f x k1) k2) to expose (f x (f k1 k2)).  Same for + and * of
    rational values.
  * optimization: quasiquote expressions now perform more constant folding,
    instead of consing equal lists at runtime. (lp#1026439)
  * optimization: local call analysis of inlined higher-order function
    should converge more quickly, resulting in better code for complex
    functions.
  * optimization: On x86-64, medium (word-sized but wider than 32 bits)
    integer constants are handled more cleverly, especially when they
    can be represented as sign-extended (signed-byte 32). (Based on a
    patch by Douglas Katzman)
  * optimization: IF/IF conversion should reliably result in sane code
    when (some of) the results of the inner IF are always false or
    always true.
  * optimization: On x86oids, variable right shifts of machine words are
    compiled into straight SAR/SHR, instead of going through the generic
    VOP. (lp#1066204)