C M U C L 20 d

The CMUCL project is pleased to announce the release of CMUCL 20d. This is a major release which contains numerous enhancements and bug fixes from the 20c 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
  • Added a new contrib, "contrib-packed-sse2" to allow packed operations ala SSE2. Support for some packed sse2 operations like multiply, divide, and shuffle for both packed singles and doubles. All operations are done on top of (complex double-float) numbers. Utility functions are provided to set and access these packed numbers.
  • Added external format for EUC-KR.

• Changes
  • ASDF2 updated to version 2.24.
  • Behavior of STRING-TO-OCTETS has changed. This is an incompatible change from the previous version but should be more useful when a buffer is given which is not large enough to hold all the octets for the given string. See docstring for more details.
  • The PowerPC port of CMUCL on Darwin (Mac OS X) has been revived and is roughly up-to-date. It will run on OSX 10.4 and 10.5. However, only the Unicode build is supported.
  • Updated to Unicode 6.1.0.
  • Many additional aliases for external formats added that match the glibc iconv aliases.
  • Implement faster LOGCOUNT function on x86, if :SSE3 feature is available. (Only applies to new uses of LOGCOUNT. The core uses the default version.)
  • On x86, SET-FLOATING-POINT-MODES clears any current and accrued exceptions that match exceptions in :TRAPS. Previously, enabling a trap when the current exception also listed that trap caused the exception to be immediately signaled. This no longer happens and now matches how ppc and sparc behave.
  • OSX Lion and XCode 4 can now compile cmucl without problems.
  • OSX 10.4 is no longer supported.
  • Micro optimizations for floats: 2*x -> x+x and x/2^{n -> (2}(n))*x.
  • Add VM::WITH-CYCLE-COUNTER to return the number of cycles elapsed when executing the body, as measured by the CPU cycle/tick counter.

• ANSI compliance fixes:
  • CMUCL was not printing pathnames like (make-pathname :directory '(:absolute "tmp" "" "/")) correctly. This is now printed using #P(...).

• Bugfixes:
  • DECODE-FLOAT was not correctly declared and could not be compiled to handle double-double-floats.
  • The source distribution now includes the scripts from the bin directory, which was previously missing.
  • The stack needs to be 16-byte aligned on Darwin.
  • LDB no longer prints prompts forever when EOF is reached.
  • LISP:UNICODE-COMPLETE now longer signals an error if the prefix isn't a prefix of the name of any Unicode character. Nil is returned instead.
  • Some VOP costs were incorrect which prevented the fast complex double-float multiplier from being used when sse3 is available.
  • External format for UTF-32 was generating an error when converting octets to a string.
  • The UTF-16-BE and UTF-16-LE external formats were returning the incorrect number of octets when surrogates pairs were decoded. This confuses the stream buffering code.
  • Fix typo in ISO8859-2 external format that caused it not to work correctly. This type potentially also caused failures for all other external formats that were based on ISO8859-2.
  • COMPILE-FILE should not signal an error when given a list for :EXTERNAL-FORMAT. Lists are needed to specify a composing external format like :DOS or :MAC.
  • EXPORT and friends should not EVAL the form when compiling. This was probably a leftover from the time when CMUCL did not have DEFPACKAGE. (See ticket:60.)
  • The debugger was not always opening the file in the correct external format. It defaulted to using *DEFAULT-EXTERNAL-FORMAT* instead of the format used when compiling the file.
  • Minor build issue in CLM debugger interface due to USE-PACKAGE no longer having special compiler treatment.
  • READ-CYCLE-COUNTER no longer destroys any live values in the EBX and ECX registers.

• Trac Tickets:
  • #50: Print/read error with make-pathname.
  • #53: UTF-8 in core.
  • #52: UNICODE-COMPLETE-NAME misses a completion.
  • #55: blocked signals.
  • #58: UTF-16 buffering problem.
  • #60: compile-file and export problem
  • #61: Darwin+clang doesn't produce a working lisp

• Other changes:
  • The layout of the cmucl directories has been changed.
  • Add -R option to build.sh to force recompiling the C runtime. (Default it to compile only what is changed.)
  • Add -R option to build-all.sh to force recompiling the C runtime.

• Improvements to the PCL implementation of CLOS:

• Changes to building procedure:

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

See <URL:http://www.cmucl.org> or <URL:http://trac.common-lisp.net/cmucl> for download information, guidelines on reporting bugs, and mailing list details.

We hope you enjoy using this release of CMUCL!