[Sbcl-announce] sbcl-1.5.2 released

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

Dear all,

For those of you of a less risky persuasion, I believe that the release
that I have just uploaded to the usual places is the result of a
relatively conservative development period; there have been some build
and maintainability enhancements, but few outright new features.

For those of you of a more riscy persuasion, I also have good news: this
development period saw the merge of a backend implementation for 64-bit
RISC-V, developed over the last few months by Charles Zhang.  There are
some known problems with this port (the test suite does not pass in its
entirety) but it is stable enough to build itself, and we would be
interested in having reports from users.  (Incindentally, a RISC-V
backend was a surprisingly common request in the SBCL user's survey that
I did earlier this year).

The high-level changes in this release, stripped of my attempts to be
vaguely humorous, are appended below.

Best wishes,

Christophe

changes in sbcl-1.5.2 relative to sbcl-1.5.1:
  * enhancement: RISC-V support with the generational garbage collector.
  * enhancement: command-line option "--tls-limit" can be used to alter the
    maximum number of thread-local symbols from its default of 4096.
  * enhancement: better muffling of redefinition and lambda-list warnings
  * platform support:
    - OS X: use Grand Central Dispatch semaphores, rather than Mach semaphores
    - Windows: remove non-functional definition of make-listener-thread
  * new feature: decimal reader syntax for rationals, using the R exponent
    marker and/or *READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT* of RATIONAL.
  * optimization: various Unicode tables have been packed more efficiently