========================== C M U C L 19 e =============================

The CMUCL project is pleased to announce the release of CMUCL 19e. This is a major release which contains numerous enhancements and bugfixes from the 19d 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 mostly in the public domain.

New in this release:

• Supported system:
  • Support for Mac OS X/Intel has been added for OSX 10.5 and later.

• Issues
  • One some openSUSE systems, cmucl will fail to start because it can't map enough memory. This might be caused be a memory limit that is set too low. Use "ulimit -a" to see the limit on virtual memory. This can be adjusted with "ulimit -v <N>"
  • Tracing on Mac OS X/Intel uses encapsulation, unlike other platforms. This means tracing recursive functions may not show the recursive calls. You can try setting debug::*trace-encapsulate-default* to :default. Be warned that under some conditions, tracing will cause an error such that you can not get back to the repl and must terminate the process in some other way.

• Feature enhancements:
  • Support for dynamic-extent added for ppc. However, it suffers from the same problems with dynamic-extent as other platforms, so it is disabled by default. Tests indicate that it does work in simple situations.
  • PARSE-TIME recognizes the format produced by C asctime/ctime. (This change may break some other less commonly used patterns.)
  • PARSE-TIME recognizes and discards any microseconds.
  • PARSE-TIME checks that a specified day of the week matches the actual day of the week given in the date. An error is signaled if they are inconsistent.
  • New option to SAVE-LISP allows creating executable Lisp images that do not require a runtime loader.

Syntax

(save-lisp "filename" :executable t) Currently supported on FreeBSD and Linux; work on a Solaris version is underway.

Limitations

depends on files in "library:" to dump new executable images.

• CMUCL's version of CLX has been replaced with telent CLX.
• Preliminary support for external formats. Currently only iso8859-1 and utf-8 are supported. Utf-8 support is limited since CMUCL only has 8-bit characters.
• UNIX-MPROTECT added to access mprotect.

• ANSI compliance fixes:
  • BOA constructors with &AUX variables are handled better now.
  • SHADOW accepts characters now.
  • Default initargs are now passed correctly to initialize-instance and shared-initialize.
  • Several issues in formatted output of floats have been fixed:
    • ~,dF won't print out extra digits if the number is too small.
    • ~E sometimes erroneously printed the overflow filler instead of the number.
    • ~G has changed so that ~E is chosen more often. This is seen when printing large numbers. Instead of printing lots of zeroes, ~E is used. ~G now matches what Fortran would do.
    • Inconsistencies between print and ~E are now gone. (See Trac ticket #1.)
    • Some incorrectly printed results for ~E have been fixed. (See Trac ticket #12.)

• Bugfixes:
  • Floating-point traps are now handled on ppc. Previously, no traps were signalled and SET-FLOATING-POINT-MODES did nothing.
  • FILE-POSITION no longer returns negative values for mapped file-simple-stream's.
  • Potential Version numbers that start with a leading 0 are no longer treated as version numbers. Hence, "foo.~1~" has name "foo", type nil, and version 1, but "foo.~01~" has type "~01~" and version :NEWEST.
  • A bug in type derivation for EXPT has been fixed. (expt x y) for x of type (double-float (0d0) 1d0) and y of type (double-float (0d0)) now returns (or (member 0d0) (double-float (0d0) 1d0)) instead of (double-float 0d0 1d0), i.e., -0d0 is not in the range.
  • On sparc, the decoding of a trapping FP instruction is correct now. Previously the wrong instruction was decoded, which produced the wrong operation and operands in the arithmetic error handler.
  • Fix issue with UNIX:UNIX-MMAP handling of "large" addresses that appeared to be negative numbers.
  • DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT fixes:
    • Converting negative rationals to double-double-float's doesn't produce wrong answers anymore.
    • (float <negative bignum> 1w0) no longer returns a positive result.
    • Some issues with creation of DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT and (COMPLEX DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT) have been fixed on sparc, ppc, and x86. These seem to work, except there appears to be some bugs on x86 when compiling at speed 3 and safety 0.
    • (INTEGER-DECODE-FLOAT <double-double-float>) was sometimes returning the wrong integer value because the two components had the wrong sign.
    • Some issues with debugger printing out DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOATs and (COMPLEX DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT)'s have been fixed.
    • CLOS now recognizes that (COMPLEX DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT) is a valid built-in class instead of a random object.
    • Branch cuts for ASIN and ATANH for double-double-float's should match the branches for double-float's.
    • ATAN2 should correctly handle signed double-double-float zeroes.
    • FASL files containing -0w0 are now converted to -0w0 instead of 0w0.
    • SIN and TAN return -0w0 when the argument is -0w0. Previously, they returned 0w0.
    • Signed zeroes are handled better for addition, subtraction, and multiplication. That is, the correct signed zero is returned now.
    • Overflow in addition, multiplication, and division returns infinity if traps are disabled.
    • EQL supports DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT's now.
    • The printer and reader should now be consistent for double-double-floats.
    • Conversion of bignums and ratios to double-double-floats should be more accurate.
    • Double-double-float's should have print/read consistency now.
    • TRUNCATE works now when given a DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT divisor.
    • FORMATted output of {{[DOUBLE-DOUBLE-FLOAT}}}'s should work.
  • The assembler for ppc had some arguments for some instructions in the wrong order, producing the wrong effect.
  • When making displaced arrays, the element types are checked to see if they are type equivalent. If not, an error is signaled.
  • The reader for #= and ## has been enhanced to be much faster for cases with a large number of shared objects. However, it is also somewhat slower for simple cases.
  • #p"..." now has a namestring and is treated as a pathname with name ".." and type "".
  • #p"..a" erroneously had directory (:relative). This has been fixed so that directory = nil, name = ".", and type = "a".
  • Compiling code using SIGNUM no longer causes a compiler error. The defoptimizer for SIGNUM was missing a case for double-double-float.
  • MAPHASH no longer causes a type-error when the mapping function calls (setf gethash) on the same table.
  • NOTINLINE declarations are honored for local functions even if they only have only one use. Previously, these would be inlined anyway. This allows tracing of such functions.
  • TRACE and UNTRACE should now work as expected for local labels/flet functions. Untracing should work. Redefining a function should automatically retrace the local functions if they were traced previously.
  • Callbacks should now work on systems where malloc'ed space does not normally allow execution of code.
  • The FLOAT-ACCURACY declaration has been removed. This should have no affect on most user's code, unless they were using this. The default is 53-bit (double-float) precision for everything and the compiler takes care of the precision for the appropriate ABI. It is the compiler's responsibility to make sure single-precision floats are done correctly with single-precision results. (This may be buggy currently.)
  • The :PRECISION-CONTROL keyword in SET-FLOATING-POINT-MODES has been removed.
  • A compiler bug with type inferencing and deleting unsued functions has been fixed.
  • A compiler bug has been fixed where a source transformation was incorrectly applied because the local variable happens to have a function type and has the same name as a known function.
  • On Darwin/x86, tracing with :encapsulate nil works better, and tracing of labels/flets works better. However, there are still issues with tracing. Returning to the repl after tracing sometimes fails, and you must exit lisp completely.
  • ~E should be faster now in some cases.
  • The range over which sin/cos/tan would use the builtin instruction on x86 has been reduced. Previously, values near the limit would either produce result greater than 1 in absolute value or cause a floating-point exception. Note that accuracy is reduced when the builtin instructions are used for very large arguments.
  • Issues with compact info environments should be fixed. The issue manifests itself when a new core is saved with lots of functions (or other objects). The resulting core executes the wrong code for some of the functions.

• Trac Tickets:
  • #8 fixed so logs of bignums and ratios that won't fit into a float can be computed, instead of signalling an error.
  • #9 fixed. An error is generated if the number of days doesn't match the number of days in the given month.
  • #10 fixed. ROUND should now return correct answers for floats bigger than most-positive-fixnum.
  • #11 fixed. EQL handles double-double-float's correctly now.
  • #1 fixed. prin1 and ~E should produce the same results.
  • #12 fixed. (format t "~10,1,2,0,'*,,'DE" 1d-6) prints "0.1D-05" now.
  • #13 fixed. (format nil "~11,3,2,0,'*,,'EE" .9999) produces 0.100e+1 instead of 1.000e+0.

• Other changes:
  • UNIX:UNIX-ERRNO accesses the thread errno value instead of the global errno value.
  • Floating point zero is now printed with an exponent of zero, independent of any scale factor that might be used. Thus, we get results like "0.0D+00" instead of "0.0D-5".
  • CMUCL should now build and run on Redhat Fedora Core 9.

• Improvements to the PCL implementation of CLOS:
  • Forward-referenced classes are allowed.

• Changes to rebuilding procedure:
  • load-world.sh now supports a -p option to load the world without PCL. This is mostly for cross-compiling which doesn't want PCL loaded because it's not build during a cross-compile.
  • make-dist.sh now defaults to bzip compression instead of gzip.

This release is not binary compatible with code compiled using CMUCL 19d; 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!