-*- coding: utf-8; mode: text; -*- The programmers of old were mysterious and profound. We cannot fathom their thoughts, so all we do is describe their appearance. Aware, like a fox crossing the water. Alert, like a general on the battlefield. Kind, like a hostess greeting her guests. Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood. Opaque, like black pools in darkened caves. Who can tell the secrets of their hearts and minds? The answer exists only in the Tao. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" BROAD OUTLINE SBCL is derived from the 18b version of CMU CL. Most of CMU CL was originally written as part of the CMU Common Lisp project at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the documentation in CMU CL 18b, Organizationally, CMU Common Lisp was a small, mostly autonomous part within the Mach operating system project. The CMU CL project was more of a tool development effort than a research project. The project started out as Spice Lisp, which provided a modern Lisp implementation for use in the CMU community. and CMU CL has been under continuous development since the early 1980's (concurrent with the Common Lisp standardization effort.) Apparently most of the CMU Common Lisp implementors moved on to work on the Gwydion environment for Dylan. CMU CL's CLOS implementation is derived from the PCL reference implementation written at Xerox PARC. CMU CL's implementation of the LOOP macro was derived from code from Symbolics, which was derived from code from MIT. CMU CL had many individual author credits in the source files. In the sometimes-extensive rearrangements which were required to make SBCL bootstrap itself cleanly, it was tedious to try keep such credits attached to individual source files, so they have been moved here instead. Bill Newman did this transformation, and so any errors made are probably his. Corrections would be appreciated. MORE DETAILS ON SBCL'S CLOS CODE The original headers of the PCL files contained the following text: ;;; Any person obtaining a copy of this software is requested to send their ;;; name and post office or electronic mail address to: ;;; CommonLoops Coordinator ;;; Xerox PARC ;;; 3333 Coyote Hill Rd. ;;; Palo Alto, CA 94304 ;;; (or send Arpanet mail to CommonLoops-Coordinator.pa@Xerox.arpa) ;;; ;;; Suggestions, comments and requests for improvements are also welcome. This was intended for the original incarnation of the PCL code as a portable reference implementation. Since our version of the code has had its portability hacked out of it, it's no longer particularly relevant to any coordinated PCL effort (which probably doesn't exist any more anyway). Therefore, this contact information has been deleted from the PCL file headers. A few files in the original CMU CL 18b src/pcl/ directory did not carry such Xerox copyright notices: * Some code was originally written by Douglas T. Crosher for CMU CL: ** the Gray streams implementation ** the implementation of DOCUMENTATION as methods of a generic function * generic-functions.lisp seems to have been machine-generated. The comments in the CMU CL 18b version of the PCL code walker, src/pcl/walk.lisp, said in part ;;; a simple code walker, based IN PART on: (roll the credits) ;;; Larry Masinter's Masterscope ;;; Moon's Common Lisp code walker ;;; Gary Drescher's code walker ;;; Larry Masinter's simple code walker ;;; . ;;; . ;;; boy, thats fair (I hope). MORE DETAILS ON SBCL'S LOOP CODE The src/code/loop.lisp file from CMU CL 18b had the following credits-related information in it: ;;; The LOOP iteration macro is one of a number of pieces of code ;;; originally developed at MIT for which free distribution has been ;;; permitted, as long as the code is not sold for profit, and as long ;;; as notification of MIT's interest in the code is preserved. ;;; ;;; This version of LOOP, which is almost entirely rewritten both as ;;; clean-up and to conform with the ANSI Lisp LOOP standard, started ;;; life as MIT LOOP version 829 (which was a part of NIL, possibly ;;; never released). ;;; ;;; A "light revision" was performed by me (Glenn Burke) while at ;;; Palladian Software in April 1986, to make the code run in Common ;;; Lisp. This revision was informally distributed to a number of ;;; people, and was sort of the "MIT" version of LOOP for running in ;;; Common Lisp. ;;; ;;; A later more drastic revision was performed at Palladian perhaps a ;;; year later. This version was more thoroughly Common Lisp in style, ;;; with a few miscellaneous internal improvements and extensions. I ;;; have lost track of this source, apparently never having moved it to ;;; the MIT distribution point. I do not remember if it was ever ;;; distributed. ;;; ;;; The revision for the ANSI standard is based on the code of my April ;;; 1986 version, with almost everything redesigned and/or rewritten. The date of the M.I.T. copyright statement falls around the time described in these comments. The dates on the Symbolics copyright statement are all later -- the earliest is 1989. MORE DETAILS ON OTHER SBCL CODE FROM CMU CL CMU CL's symbol (but not package) code (code/symbol.lisp) was originally written by Scott Fahlman and updated and maintained by Skef Wholey. The CMU CL reader (code/reader.lisp) was originally the Spice Lisp reader, written by David Dill and with support for packages added by Lee Schumacher. David Dill also wrote the sharpmacro support (code/sharpm.lisp). CMU CL's package code was rewritten by Rob MacLachlan based on an earlier version by Lee Schumacher. It also includes DEFPACKAGE by Dan Zigmond, and WITH-PACKAGE-ITERATOR written by Blaine Burks. William Lott also rewrote the DEFPACKAGE and DO-FOO-SYMBOLS stuff. CMU CL's string code (code/string.lisp) was originally written by David Dill, then rewritten by Skef Wholey, Bill Chiles, and Rob MacLachlan. Various code in the system originated with "Spice Lisp", which was apparently a predecessor to the CMU CL project. Much of that was originally written by Skef Wholey: code/seq.lisp, generic sequence functions, and COERCE code/array.lisp, general array stuff SXHASH code/list.lisp, list functions (based on code from Joe Ginder and Carl Ebeling) The CMU CL seq.lisp code also gave credits for later work by Jim Muller and Bill Chiles. The modules system (code/module.lisp, containing REQUIRE, PROVIDE, and friends, now deprecated by ANSI) was written by Jim Muller and rewritten by Bill Chiles. The CMU CL garbage collector was credited to "Christopher Hoover, Rob MacLachlan, Dave McDonald, et al." in the CMU CL code/gc.lisp file, with some extra code for the MIPS port credited to Christopher Hoover alone. The credits on the original "gc.c", "Stop and Copy GC based on Cheney's algorithm", said "written by Christopher Hoover". Guy Steele wrote the original character functions code/char.lisp They were subsequently rewritten by David Dill, speeded up by Scott Fahlman, and rewritten without fonts and with a new type system by Rob MachLachlan. Lee Schumacher made the Spice Lisp version of backquote. The comment in the CMU CL sources suggests he based it on someone else's code for some other Lisp system, but doesn't say which. A note in the CMU CL code to pretty-print backquote expressions says that unparsing support was provided by Miles Bader. The CMU implementations of the Common Lisp query functions Y-OR-N-P and YES-OR-NO-P were originally written by Walter van Roggen, and updated and modified by Rob MacLachlan and Bill Chiles. The CMU CL sort functions (code/sort.lisp) were written by Jim Large, hacked on and maintained by Skef Wholey, and rewritten by Bill Chiles. Most of the internals of the Python compiler seem to have been originally written by Robert MacLachlan: the type system and associated "cold load hack magic" code/typedefs.lisp code/class.lisp code/type-init.lisp etc. the lexical environment database compiler/globaldb.lisp, etc. the IR1 representation and optimizer compiler/ir1*.lisp, etc. the IR2 representation and optimizer compiler/ir2*.lisp, etc. many concrete optimizations compiler/srctran.lisp (with some code adapted from CLC by Wholey and Fahlman) compiler/float-tran.lisp, etc. information about optimization of known functions compiler/fndb.lisp debug information representation compiler/debug.lisp, compiler/debug-dump.lisp memory pools to reduce consing by reusing compiler objects compiler/alloc.lisp toplevel interface functions and drivers compiler/main.lisp Besides writing the compiler, and various other work mentioned elsewhere, Robert MacLachlan was also credited with tuning the implementation of streams for Unix files, and writing various floating point support code code/float-trap.lisp, floating point traps code/float.lisp, misc. support a la INTEGER-DECODE-FLOAT low-level time functions code/time.lisp William Lott is also credited with writing or heavily maintaining some parts of the CMU CL compiler. He was responsible for lifting compiler/meta-vmdef.lisp out of compiler/vmdef.lisp, and also wrote various optimizations compiler/array-tran.lisp compiler/saptran.lisp compiler/seqtran.lisp (with some code adapted from an older seqtran written by Wholey and Fahlman) the separable compiler backend compiler/backend.lisp compiler/generic/utils.lisp the implementation of LOAD-TIME-VALUE compiler/ltv.lisp the most recent version of the assembler compiler/new-assem.lisp vop statistics gathering compiler/statcount.lisp centralized information about machine-dependent and.. ..machine-independent FOO, with compiler/generic/vm-fndb.lisp, FOO=function signatures compiler/generic/vm-typetran.lisp, FOO=type ops compiler/generic/objdef.lisp, FOO=object representation compiler/generic/primtype.lisp, FOO=primitive types Also, Christopher Hoover and William Lott wrote compiler/generic/vm-macs.lisp to centralize information about machine-dependent macros and constants. Sean Hallgren is credited with most of the Alpha backend. Julian Dolby created the CMU CL Alpha/Linux port. Douglas Crosher added complex-float support. The original PPC backend was the work of Gary Byers. Some bug fixes and other changes to update it for current CMUCL interfaces were made by Eric Marsden and Douglas Crosher The CMU CL machine-independent disassembler (compiler/disassem.lisp) was written by Miles Bader. Parts of the CMU CL system were credited to Skef Wholey and Rob MacLachlan jointly, perhaps because they were originally part of Spice Lisp and were then heavily modified: code/load.lisp, the loader, including all the FASL stuff code/macros.lisp, various fundamental macros code/mipsstrops.lisp, primitives for hacking strings code/purify.lisp, implementation of PURIFY code/stream.lisp, stream functions code/lispinit.lisp, cold startup code/profile.lisp, the profiler Bill Chiles also modified code/macros.lisp. Much of the implementation of PURIFY was rewritten in C by William Lott. The CMU CL number functions (code/number.lisp) were written by Rob MacLachlan, but acknowledge much code "derived from code written by William Lott, Dave Mcdonald, Jim Large, Scott Fahlman, etc." CMU CL's weak pointer support (code/weak.lisp) was written by Christopher Hoover. The CMU CL DEFSTRUCT system was credited to Rob MacLachlan, William Lott and Skef Wholey jointly. The FDEFINITION system for handling arbitrary function names (a la (SETF FOO)) was originally written by Rob MacLachlan. It was modified by Bill Chiles to add encapsulation, and modified more by William Lott to add FDEFN objects. The CMU CL condition system (code/error.lisp) was based on some prototyping code written by Kent Pitman at Symbolics. The CMU CL HASH-TABLE system was originally written by Skef Wholey for Spice Lisp, then rewritten by William Lott, then rewritten again by Douglas T. Crosher. The support code for environment queries (a la LONG-SITE-NAME), the DOCUMENTATION function, and the DRIBBLE function was written and maintained "mostly by Skef Wholey and Rob MacLachlan. Scott Fahlman, Dan Aronson, and Steve Handerson did stuff here too." The same credit statement was given for the original Mach OS interface code. The CMU CL printer, print.lisp, was credited as "written by Neal Feinberg, Bill Maddox, Steven Handerson, and Skef Wholey, and modified by various CMU Common Lisp maintainers." The comments on the float printer said specifically that it was written by Bill Maddox. The comments on bignum printing said specifically that it was written by Steven Handerson (based on Skef's idea), and that it was rewritten by William Lott to remove assumptions about length of fixnums on the MIPS port. The comments in the main body of the CMU CL debugger code/debug.lisp say that it was written by Bill Chiles. Some other related files code/debug-int.lisp, programmer's interface to the debugger code/ntrace.lisp, tracing facility based on breakpoints say they were written by Bill Chiles and Rob MacLachlan. The related file src/debug-vm.lisp, low-level support for :FUNCTION-END breakpoints was written by William Lott. The CMU CL GENESIS cold load system, compiler/generic/new-genesis.lisp, was originally written by Skef Wholey, then jazzed up for packages by Rob MacLachlan, then completely rewritten by William Lott for the MIPS port. The CMU CL IR1 interpreter was written by Bill Chiles and Robert MacLachlan. Various CMU CL support code was written by William Lott: the bytecode interpreter code/byte-interp.lisp bitblt-ish operations a la SYSTEM-AREA-COPY code/bit-bash.lisp Unix interface code/fd-stream.lisp, Unix file descriptors as Lisp streams code/filesys.lisp, other Unix filesystem interface stuff handling errors signalled from assembly code code/interr.lisp compiler/generic/interr.lisp finalization based on weak pointers code/final.lisp irrational numeric functions code/irrat.lisp the pretty printer code/pprint.lisp predicates (both type predicates and EQUAL and friends) code/pred.lisp saving the current Lisp image as a core file code/save.lisp handling Unix signals code/signal.lisp implementing FORMAT code/format.lisp The ALIEN facility seems to have been written largely by Rob MacLachlan and William Lott. The CMU CL comments say "rewritten again, this time by William Lott and Rob MacLachlan," but don't identify who else might have been involved in earlier versions. The comments in CMU CL's code/final.lisp say "the idea really was Chris Hoover's". The comments in CMU CL's code/pprint.lisp say "Algorithm stolen from Richard Waters' XP." The comments in CMU CL's code/format.lisp say "with lots of stuff stolen from the previous version by David Adam and later rewritten by Bill Maddox." Jim Muller was credited with fixing seq.lisp. CMU CL's time printing logic, in code/format-time.lisp, was written by Jim Healy. Bill Chiles was credited with fixing/updating seq.lisp after Jim Muller. The CMU CL machine/filesystem-independent pathname functions (code/pathname.lisp) were written by William Lott, Paul Gleichauf, and Rob MacLachlan, based on an earlier version written by Jim Large and Rob MacLachlan. Besides writing the original versions of the things credited to him above, William Lott rewrote, updated, and cleaned up various stuff: code/array.lisp code/serve-event.lisp The INSPECT function was originally written by Blaine Burks. The CMU CL DESCRIBE facility was originally written by "Skef Wholey or Rob MacLachlan", according to the comments in the CMU CL sources. It was cleaned up and reorganized by Blaine Burks, then ported and cleaned up more by Rob MacLachlan. Also, since the split from CMU CL, the SBCL DESCRIBE facility was rewritten as a generic function and so become entangled with some DESCRIBE code which was distributed as part of PCL. The implementation of the Mersenne Twister RNG used in SBCL is based on an implementation written by Douglas T. Crosher and Raymond Toy, which was placed in the public domain with permission from M. Matsumoto. Comments in the CMU CL version of FreeBSD-os.c said it came from an OSF version by Sean Hallgren, later hacked by Paul Werkowski, with generational conservative GC support added by Douglas Crosher. Comments in the CMU CL version of linux-os.c said it came from the FreeBSD-os.c version, morfed to Linux by Peter Van Eynde in July 1996. Comments in the CMU CL version of backtrace.c said it was "originally from Rob's version" (presumably Robert Maclachlan). Comments in the CMU CL version of purify.c said it had stack direction changes, x86/CGC stack scavenging, and static blue bag stuff (all for x86 port?) by Paul Werkowski, 1995, 1996; and bug fixes, x86 code movement support, and x86/gencgc stack scavenging by Douglas Crosher, 1996, 1997, 1998. According to comments in the source files, much of the CMU CL version of the x86 support code assembly/x86/alloc.lisp assembly/x86/arith.lisp assembly/x86/array.lisp assembly/x86/assem-rtns.lisp compiler/x86/alloc.lisp compiler/x86/arith.lisp compiler/x86/c-call.lisp compiler/x86/call.lisp compiler/x86/cell.lisp compiler/x86/char.lisp compiler/x86/debug.lisp compiler/x86/float.lisp compiler/x86/insts.lisp compiler/x86/macros.lisp compiler/x86/memory.lisp compiler/x86/move.lisp compiler/x86/nlx.lisp compiler/x86/parms.lisp compiler/x86/pred.lisp compiler/x86/print.lisp compiler/x86/sap.lisp compiler/x86/static-fn.lisp compiler/x86/subprim.lisp compiler/x86/system.lisp compiler/x86/type-vops.lisp compiler/x86/values.lisp compiler/x86/vm.lisp was originally written by William Lott, then debugged by Paul Werkowski, and in some cases later enhanced and further debugged by Douglas T. Crosher; and the x86 runtime support code, x86-assem.S was written by Paul F. Werkowski and Douglas T. Crosher. The CMU CL user manual (doc/cmu-user/cmu-user.tex) says that the X86 FreeBSD port was originally contributed by Paul Werkowski, and Peter VanEynde took the FreeBSD port and created a Linux version. According to comments in src/code/bsd-os.lisp, work on the generic BSD port was done by Skef Wholey, Rob MacLachlan, Scott Fahlman, Dan Aronson, and Steve Handerson. Douglas Crosher wrote code to support Gray streams, added X86 support for the debugger and relocatable code, wrote a conservative generational GC for the X86 port. He also added X86-specific extensions to support stack groups and multiprocessing, but these are not present in SBCL The CMU CL user manual credits Robert MacLachlan as editor. A chapter on the CMU CL interprocess communication extensions (not supported in SBCL) was contributed by William Lott and Bill Chiles. Peter VanEynde also contributed a variety of #+HIGH-SECURITY patches to CMU CL, to provide additional safety, especially through runtime checking on various tricky cases of standard functions (e.g. MAP with complicated result types, and interactions of various variants of STREAM). Raymond Toy wrote CMU CL's PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE extension and various other floating point optimizations. (In SBCL, the PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE entry in *FEATURES* first became SB-PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE, then went away completely as the code became an unconditional part of the system.) CMU CL's long float support was written by Douglas T. Crosher. Paul Werkowski turned the Mach OS support code into Linux OS support code. Versions of the RUN-PROGRAM extension were written first by David McDonald, then by Jim Healy and Bill Chiles, then by William Lott. MORE DETAILS ON THE TRANSITION FROM CMU CL Bill Newman did the original conversion from CMU CL 18b to a form which could bootstrap itself cleanly, on Linux/x86 only. Although they may not have realized it at the time, Rob Maclachlan and Peter Van Eynde were very helpful, RAM by posting a clear explanation of what GENESIS is supposed to be doing and PVE by maintaining a version of CMU CL which worked on Debian, so that I had something to refer to whenever I got stuck. CREDITS SINCE THE RELEASE OF SBCL (Note: (1) This is probably incomplete, since there's no systematic procedure for updating it. (2) Some more details are available in the NEWS file, in the project's CVS change logs, and in the archives of the sbcl-devel mailing list. (3) In this, as in other parts of SBCL, patches are welcome. Don't be shy.) Martin Atzmueller: He reported many bugs, fixed many bugs, ported various fixes from CMU CL, and helped clean up various stale bug data. (He has been unusually energetic at this. As of sbcl-0.6.9.10, the total number of bugs involved likely exceeded 100. Since then, I've lost count. See the CVS logs.) Daniel Barlow: His contributions have included support for shared object loading (from CMUCL), the Cheney GC for non-x86 ports (from CMUCL), Alpha and PPC ports (from CMUCL), control stack exhaustion checking (new), native threads support for x86 Linux (new), and the initial x86-64 backend (new). He also refactored the garbage collectors for understandability, wrote code (e.g. grovel-headers.c and stat_wrapper stuff) to find machine-dependent and OS-dependent constants automatically, and was original author of the asdf, asdf-install, sb-bsd-sockets, sb-executable, sb-grovel and sb-posix contrib packages. Zach Beane: He provided a number of additions to SB-POSIX, implemented the original timer facility on which SBCL's timers are based. and also contributed the :SAVE-RUNTIME-OPTIONS support for SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE. James Bielman: He assisted in work on the port to the Windows operating system, and was instrumental in :EXECUTABLE support for SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE. Alastair Bridgewater: He contributed a port of the system to the Windows operating system. Robert E. Brown: He has reported various bugs and submitted several patches, especially improving removing gratuitous efficiencies in the standard library. Cadabra, Inc. (later merged into GoTo.com): They hired Bill Newman to do some consulting for them, including the implementation of EQUALP hash tables for CMU CL; then agreed to release the EQUALP code into the public domain, giving SBCL (and CMU CL) its EQUALP hash tables. Douglas Crosher: He continued to improve CMU CL after SBCL forked from it, creating many patches which were directly applicable to SBCL. Notable examples include fixes for various compiler bugs, the implementation of CL:DEFINE-SYMBOL-MACRO, and a generalization of the type system's handling of the CONS type to allow ANSI-style (CONS FOO BAR) types. Larry D'Anna: He provided several parts of SB-CLTL2 environment access, and has also worked on bugs in the IR2 conversion stage of the compiler. Alexey Dejneka: He fixed many, many bugs on various themes, and has done a tremendous amount of work on the compiler in particular, fixing bugs and refactoring. Paul Dietz: He is in the process of writing a comprehensive test suite for the requirements of the ANSI Common Lisp standard. Already, at the halfway stage, it has caught hundreds of bugs in SBCL, and provided simple test cases for them. His random crash tester has caught an old deep problem in the implementation of the stack analysis phase in the compiler. Brian Downing: He fixed the linker problems for building SBCL on Mac OS X. He found and fixed the cause of backtraces failing for undefined functions and assembly routines. He wrote the core of SBCL's alternative interpreter-based EVAL. Miles Egan: He creates binary packages of SBCL releases for Red Hat and other (which?) platforms. Helmut Eller: A lot of the code in the SB-INTROSPECT and SB-COVER contrib modules was originally written by him for Slime/Swank. Lutz Euler: He made a large number of improvements to the x86-64 disassembler. Andreas Fuchs: He provides infrastructure for monitoring build and performance regressions of SBCL. He assisted with the integration of the Unicode work. Stephan Frank: He contributed the SB-GMP contrib to exploit libgmp in bignum and ratio arithmetic. Nathan Froyd: He has fixed various bugs, and also done a lot of internal cleanup, not visible at the user level but important for maintenance. (E.g. converting the PCL code to use LOOP instead of the old weird pre-ANSI ITERATE macro so that the code can be read without being an expert in ancient languages and so that we can delete a thousand lines of implement-ITERATE macrology from the codebase.) Bruno Haible: He devised an accurate continued-fraction-based implementation of RATIONALIZE, replacing a less-accurate version inherited from primordial CMUCL. Cyrus Harmon: He fixed many PPC FFI and callback bugs. He ported Raymond Toy's work on the generational garbage collector for PPC to Linux, finding and fixing other SBCL bugs in the process. Matthias Hoelzl: He reported and fixed COMPILE's misbehavior on macros. Daisuke Homma: He added support for SunOS on x86 processors. ITA Software: They hired Juho Snellman as a consultant to work on improvements to SBCL, to be released into the public domain. The work they've funded includes faster compilation, various improvements to the statistical profiler, the SB-COVER code coverage tool, the interpreter-based evaluator and the IR2-based single-stepper. Espen S Johnsen: He provided an ANSI-compliant version of CHANGE-CLASS for PCL. Teemu Kalvas: He worked on Unicode support for SBCL, including parsing the Unicode character database, restoring the FAST-READ-CHAR optimization and developing external format support. Dmitry Kalyanov: His work was crucial in bringing the Windows backend forward; he implemented pthreads and ported SB-THREAD to this platform. Yaroslav Kavenchuk: He implemented several missing features and fixed many bugs in the win32 port. He also worked on external-format support for SB-ALIEN. Anton Kovalenko: He introduced a safepoint-based stop-the-world protocol and greatly contributed to features and bugfixes related to the Windows port. Richard M Kreyter: He added documentation support for CLOS slot readers and writers, provided several SB-POSIX and NetBSD patches, and cleaned up several of the filesystem/pathname interfaces. Frederik Kuivinen: He showed how to implement the DEBUG-RETURN functionality. Arthur Lemmens: He found and fixed a number of SBCL bugs while partially porting SBCL to bootstrap under Lispworks for Windows. David Lichteblau: He repeatedly failed to update his entry in this file. Robert MacLachlan: He has continued to answer questions about, and contribute fixes to, the CMU CL project. Some of these fixes, especially for compiler problems, has been invaluable to the CMU CL project and, by porting, invaluable to the SBCL project as well. Pierre Mai: He has continued to work on CMU CL since the SBCL fork, and also patched code to SBCL to enable dynamic loading of object files under OpenBSD. He contributed to the port of SBCL to MacOS X, implementing the Lisp side of the PowerOpen ABI. Eric Marsden: Some of his fixes to CMU CL since the SBCL fork have been ported to SBCL. He also maintains the cl-benchmark package, which gives us some idea of how our performance changes compared to earlier releases and to other implementations. He assisted in development of Unicode support for SBCL. Antonio Martinez-Shotton: He has contributed a number of bug fixes and bug reports to SBCL. Brian Mastenbrook: He contributed to and extensively maintained the port of SBCL to MacOS X. His contributions include overcoming binary compatibility issues between different versions of dlcompat on Darwin, other linker fixes, and signal handler bugfixes. Dave McDonald: He made a lot of progress toward getting SBCL to be bootstrappable under CLISP. Gabor Melis: He mainly worked on robustness related to signal handling, threads, timers with small excursions to constraint propagation, weak hash tables (based on CMUCL code) and optimizing x86/x86-64 calling convention. Perry E. Metzger: He ported SBCL to NetBSD with newer signals, building on the work of Valtteri Vuorikoski. He also provided various cleanups to the C runtime. Gerd Moellman: He has made many cleanups and improvements, small and large, in CMU CL (mostly in PCL), which we have gratefully ported to SBCL. Of particular note is his ctor MAKE-INSTANCE optimization, which is both faster in the typical case than the old optimizations in PCL and less buggy. Timothy Moore: He designed and implemented the original CMUCL linkage-table, on which the SBCL implementation thereof is based. William ("Bill") Newman: He continued to maintain SBCL after the fork, increasing ANSI compliance, fixing bugs, regularizing the internals of the system, deleting unused extensions, improving performance in some areas (especially sequence functions and non-simple vectors), updating documentation, and even, for better or worse, getting rid of various functionality (e.g. the byte interpreter). NIIMI Satoshi: He contributed a number of fixes to the FreeBSD port, implemented some external-formats and JOIN-THREAD, and also worked on the :EXECUTABLE support. Patrik Nordebo: He contributed to the port of SBCL to MacOS X, finding solutions for ABI and assembly syntax differences between Darwin and Linux. Luís Oliveira: He contributed to the port of SBCL to the Windows operating system, particuarly in the area of FFI. Scott Parish: He ported SBCL to OpenBSD-with-ELF. Timothy Ritchey: He implemented SB-BSD-SOCKETS support for the win32 port. Tobias Rittweiler He has made several contributions relating to source locations, pretty printing, SB-INTROSPECT, and the reader. Kevin M. Rosenberg: He provided the ACL-style toplevel (sb-aclrepl contrib module), and a number of MOP-related bug reports. He also creates the official Debian packages of SBCL. Joshua Ross: He fixed some bugs relating to foreign calls and callbacks on the Linux PowerPC platform. Christophe Rhodes: He ported SBCL to SPARC (based on the CMUCL backend), made various port-related and SPARC-related changes (like *BACKEND-SUBFEATURES*), made many fixes and improvements in the compiler's type system, has essentially completed the work to enable bootstrapping SBCL under unrelated (non-SBCL, non-CMU-CL) Common Lisps. He participated in the modernization of SBCL's CLOS implementation, implemented the treatment of compiler notes as restartable conditions, provided optimizations to compiler output, and contributed in other ways as well. Stig Erik Sandø: He showed how to convince the GNU toolchain to build SBCL in a way which supports callbacks from C code into SBCL. Rudi Schlatte: He ported Paul Foley's simple-streams implementation from cmucl, converted the sbcl manual to Texinfo and wrote a documentation string extractor that keeps function documentation in the manual current. Thiemo Seufer: He modernized the MIPS backend, fixing many bugs, and assisted in cleaning up the C runtime code. Julian Squires: He worked on Unicode support for the PowerPC platform. Nikodemus Siivola: He provided build fixes, in particular to tame the SunOS toolchain, implemented package locks, ported the linkage-table code from CMUCL, reimplemented STEP, implemented the compare-and-swap interface, and has fixed many bugs besides. Juho Snellman: He provided a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements to the compiler, the standard library functions, and to the garbage collector. He ported and enhanced the statistical profiler written by Gerd Moellmann for CMU CL. He completed the work on the x86-64 port of SBCL. Brian Spilsbury: He wrote Unicode-capable versions of SBCL's character, string, and stream types and operations on them. (These versions did not end up in the system, but did to a large extent influence the support which finally did get merged.) Robert Swindells: He ported SBCL to NetBSD/Sparc. Raymond Toy: He continued to work on CMU CL after the SBCL fork, especially on floating point stuff. Various patches and fixes of his have been ported to SBCL, including his Sparc port of linkage-table. Larry Valkama: He resurrected the HPUX port, and worked on the HPPA backend in general. Peter Van Eynde: He wrestled the CLISP test suite into a mostly portable test suite (clocc ansi-test) which can be used on SBCL, provided a slew of of bug reports resulting from that, and submitted many other bug reports as well. Valtteri Vuorikoski: He ported SBCL to NetBSD, and also fixed a long-standing bug in DEFSTRUCT with respect to colliding accessor names. Colin Walters: His O(N) implementation of the general case of MAP, posted on the cmucl-imp@cons.org mailing list, was the inspiration for similar MAP code added in sbcl-0.6.8. Cheuksan Edward Wang: He assisted in debugging the SBCL x86-64 backend. Raymond Wiker: He ported sbcl-0.6.3 back to FreeBSD, restoring the ancestral CMU CL support for FreeBSD and updating it for the changes made from FreeBSD version 3 to FreeBSD version 4. He also ported the CMU CL extension RUN-PROGRAM, and related code, to SBCL. INITIALS GLOSSARY (helpful when reading comments, CVS commit logs, etc.) AB Alastair Bridgewater AK Anton Kovalenko AL Arthur Lemmens APD Alexey Dejneka CLH Cyrus Harmon CSR Christophe Rhodes DB Daniel Barlow (also "dan") DFL David Lichteblau DTC Douglas Crosher JES Juho Snellman JRXR Joshua Ross LAV Larry Valkama LEU Lutz Euler MG Gabor Melis MNA Martin Atzmueller NJF Nathan Froyd NS Nikodemus Siivola PFD Paul F. Dietz PRM Pierre Mai PVE Peter Van Eynde PK/PVK Paul-Virak Khuong PW Paul Werkowski RAM Robert MacLachlan RLT Raymond Toy TCR Tobias Rittweiler THS Thiemo Seufer VJA Vincent Arkesteijn WHN William ("Bill") Newman