[Sbcl-announce] sbcl-0.6.10 checked into CVS; looking ahead to sbcl-0.7.x

[William H. N. <wil...@ai...>]

The major theme of this release is "patches from Martin
Atzmueller".:-) In particular, he made the system's SIGINT handling
much better, and see the NEWS file (reproduced below) for lots more
stuff he did.

For the moment the new release is in CVS only, with no file releases.
I tried to do file releases and got a bunch of unsettling error output
from the SourceForge CGI stuff on
  https://sourceforge.net/project/admin/editreleases.php
after I clicked the boxes for step 2:
  Warning: Missing argument 7 for frsaddfile() in /usr/local/htdocs/alexandria/www/include/frs.class on line 85
  (and several similar messages)
So I gave up for now. I'll wait a while, probably at least 3 days, and
then try again in hopes that the bug will be fixed. 

I haven't been ignoring SBCL recently, but since a lot of my SBCL
programming tends to be driven by my application programming, and a
lot of my recent application programming has involved trying to get
reasonable performance out of my code, most of my recent user-visible
changes are optimization-related. I'm more interested in making 0.6.x
stable than making it fast, so I've been keeping most things like new
optimization transforms as warm patches in contrib/*-extras.lisp
instead of actually patching them into the main distribution. This
will probably continue until the 0.7.x branch.

Here's my current TO DO list for declaring 0.6.x stable and moving on
to 0.7.x:
  ?? fixed bug 12: The type system is now smarter about the KEYWORD
    type. In particular, (SUBTYPEP 'KEYWORD 'SYMBOL) now returns T, T.
  ?? fixed bug 14: The system now gives more informative error messages
    when you mess up method combination in CLOS.
  ?? fixed bug 18: (another code-deletion bug in the compiler..)
    (if I can port a fix from CMU CL)
  ?? fixed bug 23: The system now gives an informative error message
    when OPEN fails because there aren't enough file descriptors.
  ?? fixed bug 24: COMPILE-FILE now handles READ-ERROR, instead of popping
    you into the debugger.
  ?? fixed bug 25: DEFMETHOD has been tweaked so that its expansion won't
    issue bogus warnings when it turns out not to use the .SLOTS0. symbol.
  ?? fixed bug 26: ARRAY-DISPLACEMENT is now declared to possibly return NIL.
  ?? fixed bug 34: (a problem with dumping constant instances)
  ?? fixed bug 39: A bug in the #\< VOP has been fixed, thanks to Douglas
    Crosher and Hannu Rummukainen (cmu...@co... 2000-06-26).
  ?? fixed bug 40: UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE now signals an error
    when passed an undefined type, instead of just guessing that the
    appropriate upgraded type is T.
  ?? fixed bug 55: The system macro DEFMACRO-MUNDANELY now sets the 
    documentation string correctly for the macros it defines.
  ?? fixed bug 67: TRACEing a function used in the implementation of 
    TRACE no longer crashes the system.
  ?? DEFUN vs. DECLAIM: no longer implicitly DECLAIM FTYPE by default
    ?? Add the compiler's handling of DECLAIM FTYPE, violating
       the principle that declarations are assertions, to BUGS.
  ?? --noprogrammer option
  ?? two ^D's for termination of input, should be one..
  ?? nagging cut and paste programming
  ?? split of CMU CL docs out of source package (and out of binary too?)
They're chosen because their perceived ratio of ongoing annoyance to
difficulty of fixing them is high; so if one turns out to be harder
to fix than I expect

Here's my tentative list of incompatibilities you can expect in the
0.7.x branch (other than the usual changes in fasl file versions):
  ?? a change in the debug prompt (which will probably be a nuisance
    for ILISPers)
  ?? Hopefully the PROFILE interface should settle down, perhaps
    becoming an extension to CL:TRACE.

from the NEWS file for 0.6.10:

changes in sbcl-0.6.10 relative to sbcl-0.6.9:

* A patch from Martin Atzmueller seems to have solved the SIGINT
  problem, and as far as we know, signal-handling now works cleanly.
  (If you find any new bugs, please report them!)
* The system no longer defaults Lisp source file names to types
  ".l", ".cl", or ".lsp", but only to ".lisp". 
* The compiler no longer uses special default file extensions for
  byte-compiled code. (The ANSI definition of COMPILE-FILE-PATHNAME
  seems to expect a single default extension for all compiled code,
  and there's no compelling reason to try to stretch the standard
  to allow two different extensions.) Instead, byte-compiled files
  default to the same extension as native-compiled files.
* Fasl file format version numbers have increased again, because
  a rearrangement of internal implementation packages made some 
  dumped symbols in old fasl files unreadable in new cores.
* DECLARE/DECLAIM/PROCLAIM logic is more nearly ANSI in general, with
  many fewer weird special cases.
* Bug #17 (differing COMPILE-FILE behavior between logical and 
  physical pathnames) has been fixed, and some related misbehavior too,
  thanks to a patch from Martin Atzmueller.
* Bug #30 (reader problems) is gone, thanks to a CMU CL patch
  by Tim Moore, ported to SBCL by Martin Atzmueller.
* Martin Atzmueller fixed several filesystem-related problems,
  including bug #36, in part by porting CMU CL patches, which were
  written in part by Paul Werkowski.
* More compiler warnings in src/runtime/ are gone, thanks to 
  more patches from Martin Atzmueller.
* Martin Atzmueller pointed out that bug 37 was fixed by his patches
  some time ago.

-- 
William Harold Newman <wil...@ai...>
software consultant
PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C  B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C