(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.)
+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 exceeds 100.)
+ total number of bugs involved likely exceeded 100. Since then,
+ I've lost count. See the CVS logs.)
Daniel Barlow:
- He contributed sblisp.lisp, a set of patches to make SBCL
- play nicely with ILISP. (Those patches have since disappeared from the
- SBCL distribution because ILISP has since been patched to play nicely
- with SBCL.) He figured out how to get the CMU CL dynamic object
- file loading code to work under SBCL. He ported CMU CL's support for
- Alpha and PPC CPUs to SBCL. He wrote code (e.g. grovel_headers.c and
- stat_wrapper stuff) to handle machine-dependence and OS-dependence
- automatically, reducing the amount of hand-tweaking required to
- keep ports synchronized. He's also provided support for SBCL (as
- well as for free Common Lisp in general) through his CLiki website.
+ He made SBCL play nicely with ILISP. He figured out how to get the
+ CMU CL dynamic object file loading code to work under SBCL. He
+ ported CMU CL's support for Alpha and PPC CPUs to SBCL. He wrote
+ code (e.g. grovel_headers.c and stat_wrapper stuff) to handle
+ machine-dependence and OS-dependence automatically, reducing
+ the amount of hand-tweaking required to keep ports synchronized.
+ He's also provided support for SBCL (as well as for free
+ Common Lisp in general) through his CLiki website.
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) EQUALP hash tables.
+ giving SBCL (and CMU CL) its EQUALP hash tables.
Douglas Crosher:
He continued to improve CMU CL after SBCL forked from it, creating
(CONS FOO BAR) types.
Alexey Dejneka:
- He has fixed many bugs in SBCL. There's no single summary theme, but
+ He has fixed many, many bugs. There's no single summary theme, but
he's fixed about a dozen different bugs in LOOP alone, and it appears
that a lot of his fixes there and elsewhere reflect systematic
public-spiritedness, fixing bugs as they show up in sbcl-devel or as
archived in the BUGS file.
Nathan Froyd:
- He has reported bugs and ported fixes from CMU CL. He has fixed
+ 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
+ can delete a thousand lines of implement-ITERATE macrology.)
Robert MacLachlan:
He has continued to answer questions about, and contribute fixes to,
problems, has been invaluable to the CMU CL project and, by
porting, invaluable to the SBCL project as well.
-Bill Newman:
+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
He has done various low-level work on SBCL, especially for the
SPARC port (and for CPU-architecture-neutral things motivated by
it, like *BACKEND-FEATURES*). He's also contributed miscellaneous
- bug fixes.
+ bug fixes. As of 2002-01-17, he seems to be mostly done with a port
+ of SBCL to the SPARC CPU.
Raymond Toy:
He continued to work on CMU CL after the SBCL fork, especially on
CMU CL extension RUN-PROGRAM, and related code, to SBCL.
-INITIALS GLOSSARY (helpful when reading comments, commit notes, etc.)
+INITIALS GLOSSARY (helpful when reading comments, CVS commit logs, etc.)
MNA Martin Atzmueller
DB Daniel Barlow
fasl file version.
changes in sbcl-0.7.0 relative to sbcl-0.6.13:
-* incompatible change: The default fasl file extension has changed
+* major 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
- ** various problems in the backquote readmacro
- 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.
-* There are several incompatible changes:
- ** The old implementation of EVAL, has been largely discarded (as
- per the discussion of the "IR1 interpreter" above). In its place
- is code which still interprets a few special cases, but which in
- the general case calls COMPILE and then FUNCALLs the result.
- 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), this
- can be considered an "incompatible" change because there
- are no longer any interpreted function objects.
- COMPILED-FUNCTION-P is now synonymous with FUNCTIONP, and
- doing COMPILE on the output of interactive DEFUN is now a no-op.
+* 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
+ hopefully any remaining bugs will be simpler, less fundamental,
+ and more fixable then the bugs in the old IR1 interpreter 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 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. This is
+ a particular problem in practice for the new sequence functions.
+ 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 sequence function optimizations won't really kick in
+ properly until debugging information is 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, asking for the
+ contents of a directory, which you used to be able
+ to do without explicit wildcards, e.g. (DIRECTORY "/tmp/"),
+ now needs 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. 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 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]]]"
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.)
- ** 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.
** 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,
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.)
- ** SB-C-CALL has been merged into SB-ALIEN. Almost all old code
- should still continue to work without immediate update, as
- SB-C-CALL is now a (deprecated) nickname for SB-ALIEN.
- ** 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, asking for the
- contents of a directory, which you used to be able
- to do without explicit wildcards, e.g. (DIRECTORY "/tmp/"),
- now needs explicit wildcards, e.g. (DIRECTORY "/tmp/*.*").
+ ** 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.
** 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
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.
-* 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.)
+* 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 on our little "PC" machines).
+ ** 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.
+* :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.
* 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.
projects / sbcl.git / commitdiff