-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.
+changes in sbcl-0.7.13 relative to sbcl-0.7.12:
+ * incompatible packaging change: in line with Unix convention,
+ SBCL now looks for its core file in /usr/{local/,}lib/sbcl/sbcl.core
+ if it's not in $SBCL_HOME. It also sets SBCL_HOME to match.
+ * REQUIRE and PROVIDE are now optionally capable of doing something
+ useful. See the documentation string for REQUIRE.
+ * infrastructure for a managed SBCL contrib system: contributed
+ modules in this release include:
+ ** the ASDF system definition facility;
+ ** an interface to the BSD Sockets API;
+ ** an ACL-like convenience interface to the repl;
+ (thanks to Kevin Rosenberg)
+ ** an implementation of ROTATE-BYTE, with efficient implementation
+ on x86 hardware;
+ * fixed a bug in LOG, so that LOG of a rational argument near 1 now
+ gives a closer approximation to the right answer than previously.
+ (thanks to Raymond Toy)
+ * fixed bug 157: TYPEP, SUBTYPEP, UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE and
+ UPGRADED-COMPLEX-PART-TYPE now take (ignored, in all situations)
+ optional environment arguments, as required by ANSI.
+ * fixed bugs in other functions taking environment objects, allowing
+ calls with an explicit NIL environment argument to be compiled
+ without error.
+ * fixed bug 228: primary return values from
+ FUNCTION-LAMBDA-EXPRESSION are either NIL or suitable for input to
+ COMPILE or FUNCTION.
+ * fixed a bug in DEFSTRUCT: predicates for :NAMED structures with
+ :TYPE will no longer signal errors on innocuous objects.
+ * fixed bug 231b: SETQ is better at respecting type declarations in
+ the lexical environment.
+ * fixed a bug in DEFCLASS: classes named by symbols with no or
+ unprintable packages can now be defined.
+ * fixed a bug in RESTART-BIND: The :TEST-FUNCTION option had been
+ carelessly renamed to :TEST-FUN. (thanks to Robert E. Brown)
+ * fixed compiler failure related to checking types of functions.
+ (reported by Robert E. Brown)
+ * the compiler is now much more consistent in its error-checking
+ treatment of bounding index arguments to sequence functions: in
+ (SAFETY 3) code, errors will be signalled in almost all cases if
+ invalid sequence bounding indices are passed to functions defined
+ by ANSI to operate on sequences.
+ * fixed a bug in the build procedure: documentation of SBCL-specific
+ packages is now preserved and available in the final Lisp image.
+ * lifted FDEFINITION lookup out of loops in the implementation of
+ many list operations. (thanks to Robert E. Brown)
+ * fixed a bug in the reader: the #n# reader macro now works for
+ objects of type STANDARD-OBJECT. (reported by Tony Martinez)
+ * the compiler is now aware that SYMBOL-FUNCTION returns a FUNCTION
+ and that READ-DELIMITED-LIST returns a LIST. (thanks to Robert
+ E. Brown and Tony Martinez respectively)
+ * PCL is now smarter about SLOT-VALUE, (SETF SLOT-VALUE) and
+ SLOT-BOUNDP: in particular, it is now able to optimize them much
+ better, and is now not vulnerable to having packages renamed.
+ Furthermore, a compliance bug has been fixed: SLOT-MISSING is now
+ always called when a slot is not present in an instance. (thanks
+ to Gerd Moellmann)
+ * fixed a bug related to CONCATENATED-STREAMs: PEEK-CHAR will no
+ longer signal an error on unreading a character following EOF on
+ the previous constituent stream. (thanks to Tony Martinez)
+ * fixed some bugs revealed by Paul Dietz' test suite:
+ ** ARRAY-IN-BOUNDS-P now allows arbitrary integers as arguments,
+ not just nonnegative fixnums;
+ ** the logical bit-array operators such as BIT-AND now accept an
+ explicit NIL for their "opt-arg" argument (to indicate a
+ freshly-consed result bit-array);
+ ** ELT now signals an error on an invalid sequence index in safe
+ code;
+ ** the type system is now cleverer about negations of numeric
+ types, and consequently understands the BIGNUM and RATIO types
+ better;
+ ** the type system is now cleverer about the interaction between
+ INTEGER and RATIO types: while bugs still remain, many more
+ cases are accurately computed;
+ ** in TYPECASE, OTHERWISE now only introduces an otherwise-clause
+ if it is in the last clause;
+ ** CONSTANTLY now correctly returns a side-effect-free function in
+ all cases;
+ ** DECLARE is no longer treated as a special-operator; in
+ particular, SPECIAL-OPERATOR-P no longer returns T for DECLARE;
+ * incremented fasl file version number due to the change in the
+ DEFSTRUCT-SLOT-DESCRIPTION structure.