========================== C M U C L 20 a =============================

The CMUCL project is pleased to announce the release of CMUCL 20a. This is a major release which contains numerous enhancements and bug fixes from the 19f 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:
  • On Linux and FreeBSD, it may not be possible call SAVE-LISP and create executables. This seems to be broken on FreeBSD. On Linux, it seems to depend on what version of Linux is used to create the executable. Redhat Enterprise Linux appears to be ok, but Open SuSE 10.x is not.

• Feature enhancements:
  • Support for Unicode has been added. You have Unicode support if *FEATURES* includes :UNICODE.
    • CHAR-CODE-LIMIT is 65536.
    • There is only one character type; CHARACTER and BASE-CHAR are the same types.
    • There is only one string type; STRING and BASE-STRING are the same type. All strings are UTF-16 strings and therefore contain UTF-16 surrogate pairs. While most string functions correctly handle surrogate pairs, not all do. It is up to the user to handle this. In particular, processing of strings on a character-by-character basis will need to handle surrogate pairs.
    • External formats are supported. Functions that need to know the external format take an :EXTERNAL-FORMAT keyword argument to specify the format.
      • The special variable STREAM:*DEFAULT-EXTERNAL-FORMAT* specifies the default format to be used for all streams. The default value is :ISO8859-1.
      • The standard streams, *STANDARD-INPUT*, *STANDARD-OUTPUT*, and *STANDARD-ERROR* all default to *DEFAULT-EXTERNAL-FORMAT* (which itself defaults to :ISO8859-1). You can change the encoding used for these streams by calling STREAM:SET-SYSTEM-EXTERNAL-FORMAT to set the encoding for all three streams. Alternatively, you can use (SETF EXTERNAL-FORMAT) to change the format for each stream.
      • Many external formats are supported. The complete list is in aliases, but we support at least :ISO-8859-1, :UTF-8, :UTF-16, :UTF-32, and the composing external format :CRLF.
    • CHAR-LESSP and friends perform case-folding by converting to lowercase. (The non-Unicode version converted to uppercase.)
    • STRING<, STRING>, and friends compare strings in codepoint order.
    • STRING-LESSP, STRING-GREATERP, and friends compare strings in codepoint order after doing a case-folding operation on each codepoint. The case-folding operation converts each codepoint to the corresponding lowercase codepoint.
    • LISP:UTF16-STRING-P checks to see if a string is a valid UTF-16 encoded string.
    • Unicode normalization forms are supported via LISP:STRING-TO-NFC, LISP:STRING-TO-NFKC, LISP:STRING-TO-NFD, and LISP:STRING-TO-NFKD.
    • Symbols are always normalized to NFC form.
  • WRITE-VECTOR and READ-VECTOR support vectors of with element sizes of 1 bit, 2 bits and 4 bits. For :NETWORK-ORDER, the bytes are written such that the lowest indexed element is written to the most significant part of a byte.

• ANSI compliance fixes:
  • MERGE-PATHNAMES no longer generates pathnames whose directory component doesn't start with either :ABSOLUTE or :RELATIVE. MERGE-PATHNAMES also signals errors if the generated pathname directory is invalid (such as :ABSOLUTE followed by :BACK).

• Bugfixes:
  • CMUCL sometimes gets "stuck" during compilation where it is trying to simplify the union of a large number of disjoint numeric types. Previously, we handled the case of integer types. Extend this to handle floats as well.
  • SXHASH was computing the same hash code for upper and lower case characters by up-casing the character. This isn't necessary since the characters are not EQUAL, so make SXHASH return different values for upper and lower case letter.
  • WRITE-VECTOR was not writing out enough data when no byte-swapping is needed and the end index was not given. (Confusion about the length of the vector versus the index as an octet count, not element count.)
  • Motif (CLM) should work with Unicode.
  • The stream created by WITH-INPUT-FROM-STREAM was not properly closed.
  • SXHASH was returning different values for -0f0 and -0d0 for compiled and interpreted code. They both return the same value now.
  • Some issues with potential spurious floating-point exceptions with complex arithmetic on x86 with SSE2 have been fixed. (Random junk in unused parts of an sse2 register could cause spurious FP exceptions.)
  • Numeric contagion for complex + real and complex - real was not done correctly in compiled code. Proper contagion is now done by converting the real to a complex before performing the operation.
  • CMUCL can now handle the X11 local Unix display connection on Mac OS X.
  • SETF-SLOT-VALUE-USING-CLASS-DFUN no longer signals errors when checking the new value against the declared slot type when the declared slot type was too hairy for TYPEP.
  • GENTEMP no longer generates the wrong symbol if the pretty-printer is used.
  • Some issues with slow allocation with gencgc have been worked around. Certain allocation sequences were causing all allocations to be done out-of-line into an almost full allocation region. This was especially evident on sparc and ppc when running the ansi test suite from gcl on a unicode build. CMUCL will attempt to detect this and abandon the region, allowing inline allocation to be done again.
  • For x86 builds, the floating-point precision was incorrectly set to 64 bits (long-float) instead of 53 bits (double-float). This is fixed now.

• Trac Tickets:
  • #31: pathname bug with :case :common Fixed. The common case is applied to each part of the directory, not to the directory as a whole.

• Other changes:
  • SOFTWARE-VERSION may return different results than previously. UNIX:UNIX-UNAME is now used to obtain the software version on Linux and Solaris.
  • User's manual updated with a section on internationalization (unicode).
  • DESCRIBE on characters includes the character's code and name.
  • CLX updated to the portable clx version from Christophe Rhodes darcs repository of 2009-06-16.
  • make-dist.sh will also install the source code in the specified directory if -I and -S are given.
  • CMUCL contribs (in the src/contribs directory) are now distributed as part of extras package. The contribs can be loaded by first using (require "cmu-contribs"). Then the individual contribs can be loaded with REQUIRE. The available contribs are, "contrib-demos", "contrib-follow-mouse", "contrib-games-feebs", "contrib-hist", "contrib-psgraph", "contrib-ops", "contrib-embedded-c", "contrib-sprof". The names must be given as lower case strings. These are not officially supported as part of CMUCL, but users may find them useful.

• Improvements to the PCL implementation of CLOS:

• Changes to building procedure:
  • The sparc config files are now named sparc_gcc and sparc_sunc, which use gcc and Sun C, respectively, for the C compiler. Only Solaris is supported. The old sun4_solaris_gcc and sun4_solaris_sunc configs are deprecated.
  • The Linux config file is x86_linux, which supports gencgc. The old cgc config is no longer supported.
  • The FreeBSD config file is x86_freebsd, which supports gencgc. The old cgc config is no longer supported.

This release is not binary compatible with code compiled using CMUCL 19f; you will need to recompile FASL files.

See ​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!