[Sbcl-announce] sbcl-2.6.3 released

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

Dear all,

You will now find SBCL 2.6.3 tagged in version control, and some
tarballs of this release available on SourceForge.  Thank you to all who
contributed to this month's development, not least those who provided
bug reports, patches, and other feedback: your contributions are
welcome.  The most user-visible changes in this release are summarized
below.

Christophe

changes in sbcl-2.6.3 relative to sbcl-2.6.2:
  * minor incompatible change: (MAKE-ARRAY X :ELEMENT-TYPE 'UNDEFINED) now
    signals an error, consistent with (UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE
    'UNDEFINED).
  * platform support:
    ** fix disassembler on ppc for the MFLR and ISEL instructions
    ** the Lisp Return Address object (as part of the Lisp calling convention)
       is no longer needed or supported on PPC, SPARC, MIPS or ARM.  (This
       also frees up a widetag slot previously held by return-pc-widetag)
    ** remove sensitivity to SBCL init files when building embedcore-sbcl.
       (thanks to Robert Brown)
    ** add support for the ADCX and ADOX instructions on x86-64.  (thanks to
       Robert Smith)
    ** on PPC64, indicate the number of return values through flags, making
       function calls four times faster.
    ** fix FFI involving int128 arguments on x86-64.  (thanks to Andreas
       Franke)
    ** fix build on OpenIndiana/x86-64.  (thanks to Andreas Wacknitz)
    ** fix build on Haiku/x86-64.
  * bug fix: improved stability of (particularly) the mark-region garbage
    collector.  (lp#2142711)
  * bug fix: compiler type error in complicated expression involving BOOLE and
    conditionals.  (lp#2142949)
  * bug fix: dotted lists involving symbols whose names begins with "DEF" are
    not definitions.  (lp#2143114, reported by Glenn Thompson)
  * bug fix: STABLE-SORT miscompiled on declared union types involving both
    LIST and VECTOR.  (lp#2143163, reported by akater, thanks to Vasily
    Postnicov)
  * bug fix: more consistent results between compiler and interpreter in
    numerical computations involving negative zeros.  (lp#2143383)
  * bug fix: USE-PACKAGE once again signals the correct error if an attempt is
    made to use the KEYWORD package.
  * bug fix: EQUALP on hash tables is no longer sensitive to irrelevant
    aspects of the hash table.
  * bug fix: SB-INTROSPECT:DEFTYPE-LAMBDA-LIST is more robust against types
    defined in low debug situations.
  * bug fix: ENSURE-GENERIC-FUNCTION ensures that the allocation of a generic
    function does not happen in an arena.  (Thanks to Andreas Franke)
  * optimization: actually return early when we hit the cache for a
    :MAKUNBOUND slot access.  (thanks to John Mallery)
  * optimization: streams opened with WITH-OPEN-FILE avoid having finalizers.
  * optimization: improvement of COUNT on non-simple bit-vectors, or simple
    ones with :START/:END arguments.  (lp#2142062, thanks to Andrew Berkley)
  * optimization: SIMD routines for checking strings for ASCII-only content
    are more compact.
  * optimization: the reader prefers base-string symbol-names of uninterned
    symbols if possible.
  * optimization: (length (remove-duplicates a s)) doesn't cons an
    intermediate sequence.
  * optimization: REMOVE-DUPLICATES uses hash-tables in more situations.
  * optimization: UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE is now faster.