[MIT-Scheme-devel] 9.1 release notes

[Taylor R Campbell]

I scanned the commits between 9.0.1 and 9.1 (approximately, since we
don't currently use tags to identify them), and wrote up some brief
release notes.  Not all the new features noted here are documented,
and I'm not sure it's all entirely true, so I erred on the side of
calling the major things `experimental'.  `Major' vs `minor' is pretty
random.

Any comments?

* 9.1 release notes

** Incompatible changes

*** Some declarations are no more:
AUTOMAGIC-INTEGRATIONS, ETA-SUBSTITUTION, INTEGRATE-SAFELY, and
OPEN-BLOCK-OPTIMIZATIONS.

** Major new features

*** Ephemerons and the full range of hash table weakness options

** Experimental new features

*** Control of the IEEE 754 floating-point environment
*** Interface to C libraries, and a Gtk+ binding
*** Rudimentary statistical profiling
*** Self-evaluating keyword type and notation
*** Swank support [does this work?]

** Major changes

*** 64-bit times and file offsets are mostly handled now.
*** A 20-year-old register allocator bug has been fixed.
*** Much of SF has been rewritten and some internal features removed.
*** Overall speed of compiled i386/x86-64 code has improved by better branches.
*** Primitives doing multiple allocations are less likely to wedge the GC.
*** Symbols can now be garbage-collected.

** Minor new features

*** Syntax BEGIN0
*** Procedures FLO:EXPM1, FLO:LOGP1
*** Integer division operators
*** Declaration IGNORABLE
*** Procedure ((CONSTANT-PROCEDURE <x>) <args> ...) = <x>
*** Procedure (REFERENCE-BARRIER <x>) for wrangling weakness
*** Operations on two's-complement representation of general integers
*** Unicode support in the char-set abstraction, deprecating alphabets
*** Unparser methods for entities

** Minor changes and bug fixes

*** A number of obscure bugs have been fixed.
*** IMAIL is a little faster.
*** Negative (eastern hemisphere) time zones should work now.
*** Some archaic parts of the microcode have been garbage-collected.
*** Many bugs and race conditions in subprocesses have been eliminated.
*** Scheme handles failure of the close(2) system call correctly now.
*** Scheme's stack is now marked non-executable.
*** Termcap library selection is a little more robust.
*** The build system is a little more robust to interruption.
*** Trap handling and recovery is a little more robust.
*** We now do a little more automatic testing.
*** Wt-tree balancing has been fixed.
*** `scheme --batch-mode' no longer messes with the tty modes.
*** X11 support is now dynamically loadable, not a compile-time option.