========================== C M U C L 18 c =============================

December 25, 2000

The CMUCL project is pleased to announce the release of CMUCL 18c. This is a major release which contains numerous enhancements and bugfixes from the 18b 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 multimethods and a metaobject 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 in the public domain.

Features new in this release:

• Every platform now supports (complex single-float) and (complex double-float) (and long-float for the x86).
• Every platform now supports signed-array's with elements of type (signed-byte 8), (signed-byte 16), (signed-byte 30), and (signed-byte 32).
• On the x86 and sparc platform, much larger heaps are available.
• Support for glibc2 on x86.
• Support for FreeBSD 4.x, Solaris 2.7 & 8.
• Better support for Sparc V9 machines (UltraSparc? II and later).
• Better handling of logical pathnames and pathnames in general.
• equalp hash tables implemented.
• New implementations of some sequence functions to run significantly faster.
• Specialized arrays and various other objects can be printed readably now, using a CMUCL extension.
• LOCALLY is a special form, not a macro.
• COMPILER-LET is now in the extension package.
• PRINT-OBJECT methods can be used with structures. (But the :print-object option to defstruct is still not accepted.)
• The dynamic heap size is now controllable from the command line with the -dynamic-space-size option on the x86 and sparc ports.
• The {{[-batch}}} commandline option flushes all output on exit, and causes exit upon error also when using -load.
• A new -quiet commandline to suppress informational messages.
• :cmu17 is no longer a *feature*. This may break existing code. A simple possible workaround is to replace :cmu17 with (or :cmu17 :cmu18) everywhere in the offending code.

Some sparc-specific changes:

• Bigger spaces:
  • 256 MB for read-only and static spaces
  • 128 MB for binding and control stacks
  • Upto 1 GB for the lisp heap. Default is 256 MB
• Added VOPS for complex single/double-float operations.
• Try not to use deprecated instructions in the V9 architecture.
• In certain situations, use conditional move instructions available in the V9 architecture.

And finally,

• Lots and lots of bug fixes, improvements to ANSI CL conformance and lots and lots of compiler enhancements.

This release is not binary compatible with code compiled using CMUCL 18b; 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!