RE: [Gcl-devel] Regarding the release...

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Camm.

Sorry about the late response just as the release looms - I had a backed up
drain at home and spent Friday dealing with the rather unpleasant
consequences!

| 4) There is a compiler bug in the volatile variable detection,
|    necessitating a makefile applied patch of pcl_methods.c for now.
|    If anyone wants to look into this, grep on setjmp and volatile in
|    cmpnew/*lsp.  The idea is that variables cannot be put into
|    registers if they are used in a block which could be accessed via a
|    longjmp, i.e. throw/catch.  The code that does this in gcl C files
|    manipulate the frs stack and are thus labelled.
|
| 5) There is an (apparently small) compilation output difference
|    between the ansi and traditional images.  The ANSI writes certain
|    closures with the 'turbo closure' mechanism, which looks to be an
|    improvement.  Until this is adequately tested, the makefiles use
|    the traditional image to rebuild the lsp and cmpnew core C files.

If you have any insights about whether these things could affect the Windows
build of the ANSI version, which as you know has problems, please let me
know.

| P.S. If anyone would like to write a short blurb about the release,
| I'd be most grateful.

Try this as a starting point.

======================================================================

The GNU Common Lisp (GCL) development team is pleased to release Version
2.5.0, the first major release since the untimely death of the former
maintainer Dr William Schelter over a year ago.  The project is now hosted
on http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcl/ and is maintained and developed by
a team of thirteen programmers.  Our home page lives at
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/

This release stabilises the CLtL1 compliant build of GCL on most major
Unices including 11 Debian Linux 64 and 32 bit architectures and modern
versions of Microsoft Windows (TM).  A rapisly progressing, partially ANSI
compliant version is also available on the Linux platforms.

GCL plays a substantial role in development of the Maxima computer algebra
system (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/) and ACL2, a computational logic
system (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/).  The compiler is a
decendant of the famous KCL and AKCL Common Lisp compilers and is licenced
under version two of the GNU Library General Public License.

As with any Lisp system GCL is a lot of fun to work with.  We welcome all
comments and feedback.   Developers are particularly welcome too.  You will
find that the project offers a wide variety of challenges on various
platforms to anyone with an interest in compilers, low level C programming
or Common Lisp.

================================================================

Cheers

Mike Thomas.