-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-0.7.1 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-0.8.5 relative to sbcl-0.8.4:
+ * New code in contrib/sb-introspect (still probably not entirely
+ stable yet) provides some support for smart Lisp development
+ environments like SLIME.
+ * The conditions signalled for errors occurring when loading .fasl
+ files have been systematized (inheriting from SB-EXT:INVALID-FASL)
+ in a way which should help ASDF recover gracefully.
+ * The REQUIRE/PROVIDE behavior of *MODULE-PROVIDER-FUNCTIONS*
+ stuff has been cleaned up. If you code contrib/ stuff, this might
+ affect you, and you can look at contrib/README, contrib/STANDARDS,
+ and/or the 0.8.4.27 diff to check.
+ * In full calls the compiler now does not generate checks for declared
+ argument types for all arguments.
+ * various threading fixes
+ ** and some experimental patches which didn't make it into
+ the main tree for this release, but which are shipped in
+ contrib/experimental-thread.patch as a possible fix for some
+ failures (deadlock, spinning...) in GC-intensive multithreaded
+ applications.
+ * fixed PPC build problem (source code incompatibility of different
+ library versions): added offsetof() hackery which attempts to divine
+ where glibc maintainers put uc_mcontext today
+ * fixed bug 282: compiler does not trust type assertions while passing
+ arguments to a full call.
+ * fixed bug 261: compiler allows NIL or "no value" to be accepted for
+ &OPTIONAL VALUES type parameter.
+ * fix bug 214: algorithm for noting rejected templates is now more
+ similar to that of template seletion. (also reported by rydis on
+ #lisp)
+ * fixed bug 141b: printing backquoted information readably and prettily
+ inserts a space where necessary.
+ * bug fix: obviously wrong type specifiers such as (FIXNUM 1) or
+ (CHARACTER 10) are now reported as errors, rather than propagated
+ as unknown types. (reported by piso on #lisp)
+ * bug fix: the :IF-EXISTS argument to OPEN now behaves correctly
+ with values NIL and :ERROR. (thanks to Milan Zamazal)
+ * fixed bug 191c: CLOS now does proper keyword argument checking as
+ described in CLHS 7.6.5 and 7.6.5.1.
+ * bug fix: LOOP forms using NIL as a for-as-arithmetic counter no
+ longer raise an error; further, using a list as a for-as-arithmetic
+ counter now raises a meaningful error.
+ * fixed bug 213a: even fairly unreasonable CONS type specifiers are
+ now understood by sequence creation functions such as MAKE-SEQUENCE
+ and COERCE.
+ * fixed bug 46k: READ-BYTE now signals an error when asked to read from
+ a STRING-INPUT-STREAM.
+ * compiler enhancement: SIGNUM is now better able to derive the type
+ of its result.
+ * type declarations inside WITH-SLOTS are checked. (reported by
+ salex on #lisp)
+ * fixed some bugs revealed by Paul Dietz' test suite:
+ ** incorrect optimization of TRUNCATE for a positive first
+ argument and negative second.
+ ** compiler failure in let-convertion during flushing dead code.
+ ** compiler failure while deriving type of TRUNCATE on an
+ interval, containing 0.
+ ** ASH of a negative bignum by a negative bignum count now returns
+ -1, not 0.
+ ** intersection of CONS types now canonicalizes properly, fixing
+ inconsistencies in SUBTYPEP.