-changes in sbcl-0.8.0 relative to sbcl-0.8alpha.0
- * SBCL now builds using CLISP (version of late April 2003 from CVS) as
- cross-compilation host. As a consequence, we can now bootstrap our
- way up to SBCL starting with a bare gcc toolchain and human-readable
- source code (first the source to CLISP, then the source to SBCL).
- * A contributed module containing a partial implementation of the
- simple-streams interface has been included. (thanks to Rudi
- Schlatte)
- * A contributed module implementing the RFC1321 Message Digest
- Algorithm, known as MD5, has been included.
- * minor incompatible change: The :NEGATIVE-ZERO-IS-NOT-ZERO feature
- no longer has any effect, as the code controlled by this feature
- has been deleted. (As far as we know, no-one has ever built using
- this feature, and its semantics were confused in any case).
- * minor incompatible change: As a consequence of making SLOT-EXISTS-P
- work on conditions (as required by the ANSI specification),
- SLOT-VALUE, (SETF SLOT-VALUE) and SLOT-BOUNDP likewise have the
- expected behaviour on conditions. Users should note, however,
- that such behaviour is not required by the ANSI specification,
- and so use of this behaviour may render their code unportable.
- * fixed some bugs revealed by Paul Dietz' test suite:
- ** the GENERIC-FUNCTION type is no longer disjoint from FUNCTION
- types.
- ** &ENVIRONMENT parameter in macro lambda list is bound first.
- ** SXHASH on condition objects no longer returns NIL.
- ** :ALLOCATION :CLASS slots are better treated; their values are
- updated on class redefinition, and initforms inherited from
- superclasses are applied.
- ** REMOVE-METHOD returns its generic function argument even when
- no method was removed.
- ** SHARED-INITIALIZE now initializes the values of the requested
- slots, including those with :ALLOCATION :CLASS.
- ** ALLOCATE-INSTANCE now works on structure classes defined via
- DEFSTRUCT (and not just by those from DEFCLASS :METACLASS
- STRUCTURE-CLASS).
- ** SLOT-EXISTS-P now works on conditions, as well as structures
- and CLOS instances.
- ** MAKE-LOAD-FORM now has the required methods on
- STRUCTURE-OBJECT, CONDITION and STANDARD-OBJECT.
- ** MAKE-LOAD-FORM-SAVING-SLOTS no longer returns a special
- keyword, and now implements the SLOT-NAMES argument.
- ** methods with &OPTIONAL arguments no longer allow too many
- arguments to be passed in the call without error.
- ** DEFGENERIC now checks that the :ARGUMENT-PRECEDENCE-ORDER
- option is consistent with the required arguments of the generic
- function lambda list.
- * bug fix: REQUIRE accepts a string designator. (Thanks to
- Antonio Martinez.)
- * bug fix: SB-MOP:DIRECT-SLOT-DEFINITION-CLASS and
- SB-MOP:EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION-CLASS now have the
- specified-by-AMOP lambda list of (CLASS &REST INITARGS).
- * bug fix: The compiler now checks for duplicated variables in macro
- lambda lists.
- * bug fix: SETQ on globals returns the correct value.
- * fixed bug 47.d: (DEFGENERIC IF (X)) now signals a PROGRAM-ERROR,
- not a COMPILER-ERROR (followed by some other strange error on
- choosing the CONTINUE restart).
- * bug fix: make.sh and friends are now more consistent in the way that
- they look for GNU "make".
+changes in sbcl-0.7.1 relative to sbcl-0.7.0:
+* mostly bug fixes:
+ ** SB-ALIEN:LOAD-FOREIGN and SB-ALIEN:LOAD-1-FOREIGN are set
+ up properly again. (There was a packaging bug in 0.7.0 which
+ left their definitions in SB-SYS::LOAD-FOREIGN and
+ SB-SYS::LOAD-1-FOREIGN. LOAD-FOREIGN and LOAD-1-FOREIGN are
+ vital for most things which interface to C-level interfaces,
+ like extensions working with sockets or databases or
+ Perl-compatible regexes or whatever, and the need to fix
+ this bug is the main reason that 0.7.1 was released so
+ soon after 0.7.0.)
+ ** DEFGENERIC is now choosier about the methods it redefines, so that
+ reLOADing a previously-LOADed file containing DEFGENERICs does
+ the right thing now. Thus, the Lispy edit/reLOAD-a-little/test
+ cycle now works as it should. (thanks to Alexey Dejneka)
+ ** Bug 106 (types (COMPLEX FOO) where FOO is an obscure type) was
+ fixed by Christophe Rhodes. (He actually submitted this patch
+ months ago, and I delayed until after 0.7.0.)
+ ** Bug 111 (internal compiler confusion about runtime checks on
+ FUNCTION types) was fixed by Alexey Dejneka.
+* Some internal cleanups (getting rid of variables which aren't
+ needed now that the byte interpreter is gone) caused the fasl
+ file format number to change again.
+
+changes in sbcl-0.7.0 relative to sbcl-0.6.13:
+* major incompatible change: The default fasl file extension, i.e. the
+ default extension for files produced by COMPILE-FILE, has changed
+ to ".fasl", for all architectures. (No longer ".x86f" and ".axpf".)
+* compiler changes:
+ ** There are many changes in the implementation of the compiler.
+ SBCL is now essentially a compiler-only implementation of ANSI
+ Common Lisp. EVAL still "interprets" a few special cases, but
+ almost all the interesting cases are handled by creating
+ a LAMBDA expression, calling COMPILE on it, then calling
+ FUNCALL on the result.
+ ** The EVAL-WHEN code has been rewritten to be ANSI-compliant, and
+ various related bugs (IR1-1, IR1-2, IR1-3, IR1-3a) have gone away.
+ Since the code is newer, there might still be some new bugs
+ (though not as many as before Martin Atzmueller's fixes:-). But
+ the new code is substantially simpler and clearer, and hopefully
+ any remaining bugs will be simpler, less fundamental, and more
+ fixable then the bugs in the old code.
+ ** The revised compiler is still a little unsteady on its feet.
+ In particular,
+ *** The debugging information it produces (particularly the names
+ of FUNCTION objects) is sometimes much less useful than what
+ the old compiler produced.
+ *** The support for inlining FOO when you (DECLAIM (INLINE FOO))
+ then do (DEFUN FOO ..) in a non-null lexical environment (e.g.
+ within a MACROLET) has been temporarily weakened.
+ ** There are new compiler optimizations for various functions:
+ *** the sequence functions FIND, POSITION, FIND-IF, POSITION-IF,
+ FIND-IF-NOT, POSITION-IF-NOT, and FILL
+ *** the math functions TRUNCATE, FLOOR, and CEILING
+ *** the function-of-all-trades COERCE
+ Mostly these should be transparent, but there's one
+ potentially-annoying problem (bug 117): when the compiler
+ inline-expands a function and does type analysis on the result,
+ it can create control paths which have type mismatches, and
+ when it can't prove that those control paths aren't taken,
+ it will issue WARNINGs about the type mismatches. This is
+ a particular problem in practice for the new sequence functions.
+ It's not clear how this should be fixed, and for now, a
+ workaround is given in the entry for 117 in the BUGS file.
+ ** (Because of the interaction between the two previous items --
+ occasional inlining problems and new inline expansions -- some
+ of the new sequence function optimizations won't really kick in
+ completely until debugging information, and then inlining, are
+ straightened out in some future version.)
+* minor incompatible changes:
+ ** As part of a bug fix by Christophe Rhodes to DIRECTORY behavior,
+ DIRECTORY no longer implicitly promotes NIL slots of its
+ pathname argument to :WILD. In particular, when you ask for the
+ contents of a directory (which you used to be able to do without
+ explicit wildcards, e.g. (DIRECTORY "/tmp/")) you now need to use
+ explicit wildcards, e.g. (DIRECTORY "/tmp/*.*").
+ ** changes in behavior that ANSI explicitly defines to be
+ implementation dependent:
+ *** The new compiler-only implementation still conforms with ANSI,
+ but acts a little different than before. Besides the obvious
+ changes in performance tradeoffs (that the cost per form passed
+ to EVAL has gone up, and the cost per form executed by EVAL
+ has gone down), the behavior of the system changes a little
+ because there are no longer any interpreted function objects.
+ COMPILED-FUNCTION-P is now synonymous with FUNCTIONP, and
+ e.g. doing COMPILE on the output of interactive DEFUN is
+ now a no-op.
+ *** The value of INTERNAL-TIME-UNITS-PER-SECOND has been increased
+ from 100 to 1000.
+ *** The default for the USE list in MAKE-PACKAGE and DEFPACKAGE
+ has changed from (:CL) to NIL.
+ *** The CHAR-NAME of unprintable ASCII characters which, unlike
+ e.g. #\Newline and #\Tab, don't have names specified in the
+ ANSI Common Lisp standard, is now based on their ASCII symbolic
+ names (#\Nul, #\Soh, #\Stx, etc.) The old CMU-CL-style names
+ (#\Null, #\^a, #\^b, etc.) are still accepted by NAME-CHAR, but
+ are no longer used for output.
+ ** changes in internal implementation constants:
+ *** The default value of *BYTES-CONSED-BETWEEN-GCS* has doubled, to
+ 4 million. (If your application spends a lot of time GCing and
+ you have a lot of RAM, you might want to experiment with
+ increasing it even more.)
+ ** The SB-C-CALL package has been merged into the SB-ALIEN package.
+ However, almost all old code should still continue to work without
+ immediate update, as SB-C-CALL is now a (deprecated) nickname
+ for SB-ALIEN.
+ ** Old operator names in the style DEF-FOO are now deprecated in
+ favor of new corresponding names DEFINE-FOO, for consistency with
+ the naming convention used in the ANSI standard (DEFSTRUCT, DEFVAR,
+ DEFINE-CONDITION, DEFINE-MODIFY-MACRO..). This mostly affects
+ internal symbols, but a few supported extensions like
+ SB-ALIEN:DEF-ALIEN-FUNCTION are also affected. (So e.g.
+ DEF-ALIEN-FUNCTION becomes DEFINE-ALIEN-FUNCTION.)
+ ** The debugger prompt sequence now goes "5]", "5[2]", "5[3]",
+ etc. as you get deeper into recursive calls to the debugger
+ command loop, instead of the old "5]", "5]]", "5]]]"
+ sequence. (I was motivated to do this when squabbles between
+ ILISP and SBCL left me very deeply nested in the debugger. In the
+ short term, this change will probably provoke more ILISP/SBCL
+ squabbles, but hopefully it will be an improvement in the long run.)
+ ** SB-ALIEN:DEFINE-ALIEN-FUNCTION (also known by the old deprecated
+ name DEF-ALIEN-FUNCTION) now does DECLAIM FTYPE for the defined
+ function, since declaiming return types involving aliens is
+ (1) annoyingly messy to do by hand and (2) vital to efficient
+ compilation of code which calls such functions.
+ ** SB-ALIEN:LOAD-FOREIGN and SB-ALIEN:LOAD-1-FOREIGN are no
+ longer reexported by the SB-EXT package. They're solely useful
+ for alien code, so it seems more logical that you should get
+ them from the SB-ALIEN package, not in SB-EXT.
+ ** :SB-CONSTRAIN-FLOAT-TYPE, :SB-PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE, and
+ :SB-PROPAGATE-FUN-TYPE are no longer considered to be optional
+ features. Instead, the code that they used to control is always
+ built into the system.
+* many other bug fixes
+ ** DEFSTRUCT and DEFCLASS have been substantially updated to take
+ advantage of the new EVAL-WHEN stuff and to clean them up in
+ general, and they are now more ANSI-compliant in a number of
+ ways. Martin Atzmueller is responsible for a lot of this.
+ ** Besides the cleanups discussed above, Martin Atzmueller fixed
+ several other bugs:
+ *** fixes in READ-SEQUENCE and WRITE-SEQUENCE
+ *** correct ERROR type for various file operations
+ *** some fixes for Lisp streams
+ *** DEFMETHOD syntax checking
+ *** changing old weird representation of debug information as
+ strings (which, among their other deficiencies, don't transform
+ correctly when you rename packages, and don't change their
+ print representation when you change things like *PACKAGE*
+ and *PRINT-LENGTH*) to symbols and lists of symbols
+ He also made several improvements and fixed several bugs in DESCRIBE.
+ ** Alexey Dejneka fixed many bugs, including classic bugs and bugs he
+ discovered himself:
+ *** misbehavior of WRITE-STRING/WRITE-LINE
+ *** LOOP over keys of a hash table, LOOP bugs 49b and 81 and 103,
+ and several other LOOP problems as well
+ *** DIRECTORY when similar filenames are present
+ *** DEFGENERIC with :METHOD options
+ *** bug 126, in (MAKE-STRING N :INITIAL-ELEMENT #\SPACE))
+ *** bug in the optimization of ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE
+ *** argument ordering in FIND with :TEST option
+ *** mishandled package designator argument in APROPOS-LIST
+ *** various problems in the backquote readmacro
+ *** a bug in APROPOS
+ *** probably some others that I'm not describing very well here,
+ since the CVS log documents them by reference to sbcl-devel
+ messages, and the SourceForge archives aren't working well.:-(
+ ** Dan Barlow improved the Alpha port (and is making progress on the
+ PPC port, for those of you who think different).
+ ** Besides the DIRECTORY fixes and changes mentioned elsewhere,
+ Christophe Rhodes cleaned up the system self-test scripts (in tests/*),
+ contributed the optimization of FIND-IF-NOT and POSITION-IF-NOT, and
+ continues to work on the SPARC port (for those of you in a position
+ to look down upon our little PC-compatible boxes from a great height).
+ ** PPRINT-LOGICAL-BLOCK now copies the *PRINT-LINES* value on entry
+ and uses that copy, rather than the current dynamic value, when
+ it's trying to decide whether to truncate output. Thus e.g.
+ (let ((*print-lines* 50))
+ (pprint-logical-block (stream nil)
+ (dotimes (i 10)
+ (let ((*print-lines* 8))
+ (print (aref possiblybigthings i) stream)))))
+ should now truncate the logical block only at 50 lines, instead of
+ often truncating it at 8 lines, as it did before.
+* The doc/cmucl/ directory, containing old CMU CL documentation
+ from the time of the fork, is no longer part of the base system.
+ SourceForge has shut down its anonymous FTP service, and with it
+ my original plan for distributing the old CMU CL documentation
+ there. For now, if you need these files you can download an old
+ SBCL source release and extract them from it.
+* The fasl file version number changed again, for dozens of reasons,
+ some of which are apparent above.