Release Notes for CMUCL 20c

The CMUCL project is pleased to announce the release of CMUCL 20c. This is a major release which contains numerous enhancements and bug fixes from the 20b release.

CMUCL is a free, high performance implementation of the Common Lisp programming language which runs on most major Unix platforms. It mainly conforms to the ANSI Common Lisp standard. CMUCL provides a sophisticated native code compiler; a powerful foreign function interface; an implementation of CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, which includes multi-methods and a meta-object protocol; a source-level debugger and code profiler; and an Emacs-like editor implemented in Common Lisp. CMUCL is maintained by a team of volunteers collaborating over the Internet, and is mostly in the public domain.

New in this release:

• Known issues:

• Feature enhancements
  • Update to Unicode 6.0.0.
  • Add support for character name completion. This can be used by Slime to do character name completion.
  • Support for Solaris/x86. CMUCL will run on Solaris/x86 with all features available, except only Unicode is supported.

• Changes
  • ASDF2 updated to version 2.017.
  • COMPILE-FILE now accepts a :DECODING-ERROR argument that indicates how to handle decoding errors when reading the file. It has the same meaning and effect as the :DECODING-ERROR argument to OPEN. This defaults to T here so that decoding errors are signaled on invalid sequences instead of silently replacing the bad sequence with some kind of replacement character.
  • In 19f through 20b, READ-SEQUENCE could read mostly arbitrary data from a stream in to the given sequence. In this release, READ-SEQUENCE cannot do that unless the stream is a binary-text-stream. This is an incompatible change from previous releases.
  • RUN-PROGRAM accepts :EXTERNAL-FORMAT parameter to specify the external format to be used for any streams that RUN-PROGRAM needs to create.
  • Add src/tools/build-all.sh to automate building all of the variants (x87/sse2, unicode/8-bit).
  • LISP::ENUMERATE-MATCHES had a keyword arg named :VERIFY-EXISTANCE. This has been changed to :VERIFY-EXISTENCE.
  • Added -unidata command line option to allow user to specify the unidata.bin file to be used instead of the default one.
  • :CMUCL is now in *FEATURES*.
  • Add LISP:LOAD-ALL-UNICODE-DATA to load all the Unicode information into core. This is useful for creating an executable image that does not need unidata.bin.
  • CMUCL no longer exits if you specify a core file with an executable image. A warning is printed instead and the core file is used.
  • Improve type propagation for LOAD-TIME-VALUE.
  • Add -O option to build.sh to allow specifying options to lisp when doing the builds.
  • (format t "a~0&b") should not output a newline between a and b.

• ANSI compliance fixes:
  • Fixes for signaling errors with READ-CHAR and READ-BYTE
    • READ-CHAR signals errors if the stream is not a character stream. This is a change from 20a and 20b, but matches releases before 19f. (Almost. 19f allowed reading characters from (unsigned-byte 8) streams. 19e did not.)
    • READ-BYTE signals errors if the stream is not a binary stream. This is also a change from 20a and 20b, but matches releases before 19f. (Almost. 19f allowed reading bytes from character streams. 19e did not.)
    • But READ-CHAR and READ-BYTE will work if the stream class is 'binary-text-stream, an extension for bivalent streams in CMUCL. READ-CHAR will use the specified external format for such streams. READ-BYTE reads (unsigned-byte 8) elements from such streams.
  • UNINTERN no longer removes the wrong symbol. UNINTERN would remove the symbol when inherited from another package although it should not.
  • DEFSTRUCT allows multiple keyword constructors as required by the spec..
  • In COMPILE-FILE, the :OUTPUT-FILE can also be a stream.
  • (OPEN f :DIRECTION :IO :IF-DOES-NOT-EXIST NIL) no longer signals an error if f does not exist. It returns NIL now.
  • The second value returned by COMPLE-FILE is now T when there are style warnings.

• Bugfixes:
  • The pairwise composition table is now correctly built. Previously, it skipped over non-BMP codepoints. This also requires a fix in %COMPOSE to handle non-BMP codepoints correctly. The normalization test now passes.
  • On x86, REALPART and IMAGPART no longer incorrectly returns 0 instead of the correct part of a complex number in some situations.
  • The command line parser now correctly handles the case where -- is the first command option.
  • build.sh was accidenally loading the site-init file, but it shouldn't.
  • On sparc, the vops to add a float to a complex were broken, resulting in a complex number with the float as realpart and garbage for the imaginary part. This is now fixed.
  • XLIB::GET-BEST-AUTHORIZATION will now return authorization data if the protocol is :local, if the xauth file contains just "localhost/unix:0". Previously, no authorization data was returned because GET-BEST-AUTHORIZATION was looking for the hostname.
  • FORMAT signals an warning if ~:; is used inside ~:[.
  • SET-SYSTEM-EXTERNAL-FORMAT was not actually setting the filename encoding if given.
  • SUBSEQ with an end index less than the start index sometimes crashes CMUCL. Now, signal an error if the bounds are not valid.
  • Localization support was causing many calls to stat trying to find non-existent translation files. This has been fixed so that the results are cached. (If new translations are added, the cache will need to be cleared or cmucl restarted.) This change cuts building time by half on Solaris/sparc.
  • On NetBSD, function-end breakpoints, especially for tail-recursive functions, are working now.
  • On NetBSD, display of FP numbers (sse2 and x87) during tracing has been corrected. Previously, random values were displayed.
  • Executables images can now be created on NetBSD again.
  • EXT::DESCRIBE-EXTERNAL-FORMAT was not exported.
  • TRACE was erroneously allowing encapsulation when tracing local flet/labels functions. This doesn't actually trace anything. An error is now signaled in this case. This usually happens because the function is in one of CMUCL's internal implementation packages. If you know what you're doing, you can use the trace option :encapsulate nil to trace them. Tracing functions used by TRACE can cause bad things to happen.
  • In some situations the compiler could not constant fold SQRT calls because KERNEL:%SQRT was not defined on x86 with SSE2. Fix this by making sure KERNEL:%SQRT is defined.
  • Opening a file whose name contains "[" with :IF-EXISTS :NEW-VERSION no longer causes an error.
  • Getting documentation of a structure via DOCUMENTATION no longer signals an error in DGETTEXT trying to translate the null documentation string.
  • Reduce unnecessary consing of SAPs in ROOM.
  • Make stack overflow checking actually work on Mac OS X. The implementation had the :stack-checking feature, but it didn't actually prevent stack overflows from crashing lisp.
  • Fix rounding of numbers larger than a fixnum. (See Trac #10 for a related issue.)
  • Properly handle the denormal operand trap on x86es.

• Trac Tickets:
  • #43: unread-char doesn't change file-position Fixed.
  • #47: Added command line flags -read-only-space-size, *static-space-size, -control-stack-size, and -binding-stack-size to control the size of the each region. The default size for each is unchanged.
  • #48: RCS keywords in git. The RCS $Header$ keyword has been changed so that file compiler generates the appropriate replacement, which is stored in the fasl.
  • #49: RCS keywords need to be updated. The $Header$ keywords have been replaced with just the file path---the revision, date, and author have been removed.

• Other changes:

• Improvements to the PCL implementation of CLOS:

• Changes to building procedure:
  • A new script, src/tools/build-all.sh, has been added. This will compile all variants for a given OS and architecture. That is, both x87 and sse2 binaries are built (if available) as well as unicode and non-unicode versions.

This release is not binary compatible with code compiled using CMUCL 20b; you will need to recompile FASL files.

See <URL:http://www.cons.org/cmucl/> for download information, guidelines on reporting bugs, and mailing list details.

We hope you enjoy using this release of CMUCL!