some time ago.
changes in sbcl-0.6.11 relative to sbcl-0.6.10:
+* Martin Atzmueller pointed out that bugs #9 and #25 are gone in
+ current SBCL.
+* bug 34 fixed by Martin Atzmueller: dumping/loading instances works
+ better
+* fixed bug 40: TYPEP, SUBTYPEP, UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE,
+ and UPGRADED-COMPLEX-PART-TYPE now work better with of compound
+ types built from undefined types, e.g. '(VECTOR SOME-UNDEF-TYPE).
+* DESCRIBE now works on structure objects again.
+* Most function call argument type mismatches are now handled as
+ STYLE-WARNINGs instead of full WARNINGs, since the compiler doesn't
+ know whether the function will be redefined before the call is
+ executed. (The compiler could flag local calls with full WARNINGs,
+ as per the ANSI spec "3.2.2.3 Semantic Constraints", but right now
+ it doesn't keep track of enough information to know whether calls
+ are local in this sense.)
+* Compiler output is now more verbose, with messages truncated
+ later than before. (There should be some supported way for users
+ to override the default verbosity, but I haven't decided how to
+ provide it yet, so this behavior is still controlled by the internal
+ SB-C::*COMPILER-ERROR-PRINT-FOO* variables in
+ src/compiler/ir1util.lisp.)
+* Fasl file format version numbers have increased again, because
+ support for the Gray streams extension changes the layout of the
+ system's STREAM objects.
* The Gray subclassable streams extension now works, thanks to a
patch from Martin Atzmueller.
* The full LOAD-FOREIGN extension (not just the primitive
but like most other programs, it defaults to copying the Unix
environment from the original process instead of starting the
new process in an empty environment.
-* fixed bug 40: TYPEP, SUBTYPEP, UPGRADED-ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE,
- and UPGRADED-COMPLEX-PART-TYPE now work better with of compound
- types built from undefined types, e.g. '(VECTOR SOME-UNDEF-TYPE).
* Extensions which manipulate the Unix environment now support
an :ENVIRONMENT keyword option which doesn't smash case or
do other bad things. The CMU-CL-style :ENV option is retained
for porting convenience.
* LOAD-FOREIGN (and LOAD-1-FOREIGN) now support logical pathnames,
as per Daniel Barlow's suggestion and Martin Atzmueller's patch
-* DESCRIBE now works on structure objects again.
-* Fasl file format version numbers have increased again, because
- support for the Gray streams extension changes the format of the
- system's stream objects.
+
+changes in sbcl-0.6.12 relative to sbcl-0.6.11:
+* incompatible change: The old SB-EXT:OPTIMIZE-INTERFACE declaration
+ is no longer recognized. I apologize for this, because it was
+ listed in SB-EXT as a supported extension, but I found that
+ its existing behavior was poorly specified, as well as incorrectly
+ specified, and it looked like too much of a mess to straighten it
+ out. I have enough on my hands trying to get ANSI stuff to work..
+* many patches ported from CMU CL by Martin Atzmueller, with
+ half a dozen bug fixes in pretty-printing and the debugger, and
+ half a dozen others elsewhere
+* fixed bug 13: Floating point infinities are now supported again.
+ They might still be a little bit flaky, but thanks to bug reports
+ from Nathan Froyd and CMU CL patches from Raymond Toy they're not
+ as flaky as they were.
+* The --noprogrammer command line option is now supported. (Its
+ behavior is slightly different in detail from what the old man
+ page claimed it would do, but it's still appropriate under the
+ same circumstances that the man page talks about.)
+* The :SB-PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE and :SB-PROPAGATE-FUN-TYPE features
+ are now supported, and enabled by default. Thus, the compiler can
+ handle many floating point and complex operations much less
+ inefficiently. (Thus e.g. you can implement a complex FFT
+ without consing!)
+* The compiler now detects type mismatches between DECLAIM FTYPE
+ and DEFUN better, and implements CHECK-TYPE more correctly, and
+ SBCL builds under CMU CL again despite its non-ANSI EVAL-WHEN,
+ thanks to patches from Martin Atzmueller.
+* various fixes to make the cross-compiler more portable to
+ ANSI-conforming-but-different cross-compilation hosts (notably
+ Lispworks for Windows, following bug reports from Arthur Lemmens)
+* A bug in READ-SEQUENCE for CONCATENATED-STREAM, and a gross
+ ANSI noncompliance in DEFMACRO &KEY argument parsing, have been
+ fixed thanks to Pierre Mai's CMU CL patches.
+* fixes to keep the system from overflowing internal counters when
+ it tries to use i/o buffers larger than 16M bytes
+* fixed bug 45a: Various internal functions required to support
+ complex special functions have been merged from CMU CL sources.
+ (When I was first setting up SBCL, I misunderstood a compile-time
+ conditional #-OLD-SPECFUN, and so accidentally deleted them.)
+* improved support for type intersection and union, fixing bug 12
+ (e.g., now (SUBTYPEP 'KEYWORD 'SYMBOL)=>T,T) and some other
+ more obscure bugs as well
+* some steps toward byte-compiling non-performance-critical
+ parts of the system, courtesy of patches from Martin Atzmueller
+* Christophe Rhodes has made some debian packages of sbcl at
+ <http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/debian/lisp>.
+ From his sbcl-devel e-mail of 2001-04-08 they're not completely
+ stable, but are nonetheless usable. When he's ready, I'd be happy
+ to add them to the SourceForge "File Releases" section. (And if
+ anyone wants to do RPMs or *BSD packages, they'd be welcome too.)
+* new fasl file format version number (because of changes in
+ internal representation of (OR ..) types to accommodate the new
+ support for (AND ..) types, among other things)
+
+changes in sbcl-0.6.13 relative to sbcl-0.6.12:
+* a port to the Compaq/DEC Alpha CPU, thanks to Dan Barlow
+* Martin Atzmueller ported Tim Moore's marvellous CMU CL DISASSEMBLE
+ patch, so that DISASSEMBLE output is much nicer.
+* The code in the SB-PROFILE package now seems reasonably stable.
+ I still haven't decided what the final interface should look like
+ (I'd like PROFILE to interact cleanly with TRACE, since both
+ facilities use function encapsulation) but if you have a need
+ for profiling now, you can probably use it successfully with
+ the current CMU-CL-style interface.
+* Pathnames and *DEFAULT-DIRECTORY-DEFAULTS* are much more
+ ANSI-compliant, thanks to various fixes and tests from Dan Barlow.
+ Also, at Dan Barlow's suggestion, TRUENAME on a dangling symbolic
+ link now returns the dangling link itself, and for similar
+ reasons, TRUENAME on a cyclic symbolic link returns the cyclic
+ link itself. (In these cases the old code signalled an error and
+ looped endlessly, respectively.) Thus, DIRECTORY now works even
+ in the presence of dangling and cyclic symbolic links.
+* Compiler trace output (the :TRACE-FILE option to COMPILE-FILE)
+ is now a supported extension again, since the consensus on
+ sbcl-devel was that it can be useful for ordinary development
+ work, not just for debugging SBCL itself.
+* The default for SB-EXT:*DERIVE-FUNCTION-TYPES* has changed to
+ NIL, i.e. ANSI behavior, i.e. the compiler now recognizes
+ that currently-defined functions might be redefined later with
+ different return types.
+* Hash tables can be printed readably, as inspired by CMU CL code
+ of Eric Marsden and SBCL code of Martin Atzmueller.
+* better error handling in CLOS method combination, thanks to
+ Martin Atzmueller porting Pierre Mai's CMU CL patches
+* more overflow fixes for >16Mbyte I/O buffers
+* A bug in READ has been fixed, so that now a single Ctrl-D
+ character suffices to cause end-of-file on character streams.
+ In particular, now you only need one Ctrl-D at the command
+ line (not two) to exit SBCL.
+* fixed bug 26: ARRAY-DISPLACEMENT now returns (VALUES NIL 0) for
+ undisplaced arrays.
+* fixed bug 107 (reported as a CMU CL bug by Erik Naggum on
+ comp.lang.lisp 2001-06-11): (WRITE #*101 :RADIX T :BASE 36) now
+ does the right thing.
+* The implementation of some type tests, especially for CONDITION
+ types, is now tidier and maybe faster, due to CMU CL code
+ originally by Douglas Crosher, ported by Martin Atzmueller.
+* Some math functions have been fixed, and there are new
+ optimizers for deriving the types of COERCE and ARRAY-ELEMENT-TYPE,
+ thanks to Raymond Toy's work on CMU CL, ported by Martin Atzmueller.
+* (There are also some new optimizers in contrib/*-extras.lisp. Those
+ aren't built into sbcl-0.6.13, but are a sneak preview of what's
+ likely to be built into sbcl-0.7.0.)
+* A bug in COPY-READTABLE was fixed. (Joao Cachopo's patch to CMU
+ CL, ported to SBCL by Martin Atzmueller)
+* DESCRIBE now gives more information in some cases. (Pierre Mai's
+ patch to CMU CL, ported to SBCL by Martin Atzmueller)
+* Martin Atzmueller and Bill Newman fixed some bugs in INSPECT.
+* There's a new slam.sh hack to shorten the edit/compile/debug
+ cycle for low-level changes to SBCL itself, and a new
+ :SB-AFTER-XC-CORE target feature to control the generation of
+ the after-xc.core file needed by slam.sh.
+* minor incompatible change: The ENTRY-POINTS &KEY argument to
+ COMPILE-FILE is no longer supported, so that now every function
+ gets an entry point, so that block compilation looks a little
+ more like the plain vanilla ANSI section 3.2.2.3 scheme.
+* minor incompatible change: SB-EXT:GET-BYTES-CONSED now
+ returns the number of bytes consed since the system started,
+ rather than the number consed since the first time the function
+ was called. (The new definition parallels ANSI functions like
+ CL:GET-INTERNAL-RUN-TIME.)
+* minor incompatible change: The old CMU-CL-style DIRECTORY options,
+ i.e. :ALL, :FOLLOW-LINKS, and :CHECK-FOR-SUBDIRS, are no longer
+ supported. Now DIRECTORY always does the abstract Common-Lisp-y
+ thing, i.e. :ALL T :FOLLOW-LINKS T :CHECK-FOR-SUBDIRS T.
+* Fasl file version numbers are now independent of the target CPU,
+ since historically most system changes which required version
+ number changes have affected all CPUs equally. Similarly,
+ the byte fasl file version is now equal to the ordinary
+ fasl file version.
+
+changes in sbcl-0.7.0 relative to sbcl-0.6.13:
+* incompatible change: The default fasl file extension has changed
+ to ".fasl", for all architectures. (No longer ".x86f" and ".axpf".)
+* 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
+ hopefully any remaining bugs will be simpler, less fundamental,
+ and more fixable then the bugs in the old IR1 interpreter code.
+* The IR1 interpreter, byte compiler, and byte interpreter are gone.
+ It's long been my plan to remove the IR1 interpreter while making
+ EVAL-WHEN ANSI-compliant. It turned out that a cascade of changes
+ caused by EVAL-WHEN ANSIness would have required fairly simple
+ changes to the byte compiler; except they turned out to be quite
+ difficult. This, plus the new familiarity with the byte compiler
+ in general that I picked up as I worked on this specific problem,
+ reduced my opinion of its maintainability enough that I deleted it
+ instead of trying to fix it.
+* The compiler, especially the IR1 phase of the compiler, has been
+ tweaked somewhat to support the new implementation of DEFUN and
+ of the static linking hack used for cold init. In particular,
+ the property of "is externally visible" is now orthogonal to
+ the property of "is optimized/specialized for being called
+ at LOAD time, with no arguments and no argument checking".
+ The old FUNCTIONAL-KIND=:TOP-LEVEL type code which
+ conflated these two properties has been replaced with the
+ FUNCTIONAL-HAS-EXTERNAL-REFERENCES-P flag. This has minor
+ beneficial consequences for the logic of #'CL:COMPILE and other
+ things. Like the rewrite of EVAL, it has also quite possibly
+ introduced some new bugs, but since the new logic is simpler and
+ more orthogonal, hopefully it will be easier to clean up bugs
+ in the new code than it was in the old code.
+* Some obscure compiler bugs (notably a messy one involving closures
+ over variables when the closure relationship was stretched over
+ multiple compilation components) were exposed by the new way that
+ the compiler is used, and were fixed.
+* The revised compiler is still a little unsteady on its feet.
+ In particular, the debugging information it produces is sometimes
+ broken, and the support for inlining FOO when you
+ (DECLAIM (INLINE FOO)) then do (DEFUN FOO ..) in a non-null
+ lexical environment has been temporarily weakened (because the
+ old clever code depended on correct debugging information).
+* There are new compiler optimizations for various functions: FIND,
+ POSITION, FIND-IF, POSITION-IF, FILL, COERCE, TRUNCATE, FLOOR, and
+ CEILING. Mostly these should be transparent, but there's one
+ potentially-annoying problem (bug 117): when the compiler inline
+ expands the FIND/POSITION family of functions and does type
+ analysis on the result, it can find control paths which have
+ type mismatches, and when it can't prove that they're not taken,
+ it will issue WARNINGs about the type mismatches. It's not clear
+ how to make the compiler smart enough to fix this in general, but
+ 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 -- the
+ new FIND, POSITION, FIND-IF, and POSITION-IF code won't really
+ kick in properly until debugging information is straightened out
+ in some future version.)
+* 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.
+* A bug in LOOP operations on hash tables has been fixed, thanks
+ to a bug report and patch from Alexey Dejneka.
+* 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 truncate the logical block only at 50 lines, instead of
+ often truncating it at 8 lines.
+* Martin Atzmueller fixed several other bugs:
+ ** correct ERROR type for various file operations
+ ** removing dead code
+* Alexey Dejneka fixed many bugs, both 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
+ He also pointed out some bogus old entries in BUGS, and fixed
+ a number of bugs which came into existence in the pre7 branch
+ (internal to the CVS repository), so that they never showed
+ up in release versions.
+* :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.
+* minor incompatible change: 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.)
+* minor incompatible change: 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
+ names (#\Null, #\^a, #\^b, etc.) are still accepted by NAME-CHAR.
+?? 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.
+* minor incompatible change: 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 (and
+ since people writing calls-to-C code aren't likely to be bothered
+ by implicit assumptions of static typing).
+* The value of INTERNAL-TIME-UNITS-PER-SECOND has been increased
+ from 100 to 1000.
+* The default value of *BYTES-CONSED-BETWEEN-GCS* has been
+ 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 interpreter, EVAL, has been rewritten. Now it calls the
+ native compiler for the difficult cases, where it used to call
+ the old specialized IR1 interpreter code.
+* 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.
+* lots of other tidying up internally: renaming things so that names
+ are more systematic and consistent, converting C macros to inline
+ functions, systematizing indentation, making symbol packaging
+ more logical, and so forth
+* The fasl file version number changed again, for dozens of reasons,
+ some of which are apparent above.
planned incompatible changes in 0.7.x:
-* 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 ILISP and SBCL got into arguments which left me
- deeply nested in the debugger.)
-* When the profiling interface settles down, it might impact TRACE.
- They both encapsulate functions, and it's not clear yet how
- e.g. UNPROFILE will interact with TRACE and UNTRACE. (This shouldn't
- matter, though, unless you are using profiling.)
+* When the profiling interface settles down, maybe in 0.7.x, maybe
+ later, it might impact TRACE. They both encapsulate functions, and
+ it's not clear yet how e.g. UNPROFILE will interact with TRACE
+ and UNTRACE. (This shouldn't matter, though, unless you are
+ using profiling. If you never profile anything, TRACE should
+ continue to behave as before.)
+?? Inlining can now be controlled the ANSI way, without
+ MAYBE-INLINE, since the idiom
+ (DECLAIM (INLINE FOO))
+ (DEFUN FOO (..) ..)
+ (DECLAIM (NOTINLINE FOO))
+ (DEFUN BAR (..) (FOO ..))
+ (DEFUN BLETCH (..) (DECLARE (INLINE FOO)) (FOO ..))
+ now does what ANSI says it should. The CMU-CL-style
+ SB-EXT:MAYBE-INLINE declaration is now deprecated and ignored.