Greetings! The GCL team is happy to announce the release of version
2.6.13, the latest achievement in the 'stable' (as opposed to
'development') series. Please see http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl for
downloading information.
This release consolidates several years of work on GCL internals,
performance and ansi compliance.
I got the release from git and built it without problems. Built maxima too, but I get memory corruption errors and a fatal segfault runnint the testsuite. I'm using the current maxima HEAD, not your cleanup banch. (Which looks really nice, BTW.)
Garbage collection has been overhauled and significantly accelerated.
Contiguous block handling is now as fast as or perhaps faster than
relblock handling, leading to the now implemented promotion of relblock
data to contiguous after a surviving a number of gc calls. Relblock is
only written once during gc. Heap allocation is fully dynamic at
runtime and controllable with environment variables without
recompilation. While SGC is supported, it is found in practice to be
less useful with modern large memory cores and is off by default. </p>
GCC on several platforms defaults to code which must lie within a common
2Gb space, now an issue with heaps routinely larger than this. Error
protection for code address overflow is in place on most machines. The
variable si::*code-block-reserve* can be set to a static array of
element type 'character to preallocate a code block early within an
acceptable range. On amd64, compile-file takes a :large-memory-model-p
keyword (with compiler::*default-large-memory-model-p*) to compile
somewhat slower code which can be loaded at an arbitrary address.
The COMMON-LISP package is fixed to the ansi standard. A CLTL1-COMPAT
package is defined to support earlier applications, and is used in
non-ansi builds.
GCL can optionally manage a single heap load across multiple processes
via the GCL_MULTIPROCESS_MEMORY_POOL environment variable. GCL can
compile gprof profiling code in non-profiling images using the :prof-p
keyword to compile, causing '(si::gprof-start)(...)(si::gprof-quit)' to
only report calls to such code. GCL supports riscv4, and 64bit cygwin
on Windows in addition to the previous 21 architectures. GCL has
extensive support for hardware floating point exception handling via the
#'si::break-on-floating-point-exceptions function, taking the floating
point errors as keyword arguments.
Several ANSI compliance errors have been fixed, most particularly in
pathnames and restarts. Hashtables have been accelerated, supporting
caching, static allocation, and 'equalp tests.
Circle detection and handling has been greatly accelerated, using the gc
marking algorithm for a copy-less implementation.
The compiler no longer writes data files reordering
"package-operations", changing the data file format to one loadable on
object file initialization.
Floating point reading and writing has been made more precise. Inf/nan
handling matches IEEE specifications.
Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:
https://www.gnu.org/software/gcl//gcl-2.6.13.tar.gz
https://www.gnu.org/software/gcl//gcl-2.6.13.tar.gz.sig
Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:
15b99ce0a0274ea1487866593d1262b0ce0051fa gcl-2.6.13.tar.gz
8OnPPf67vS3iJo9GC49W/ItKGRRBs2IAF+RLJcmssY4 gcl-2.6.13.tar.gz
The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the
hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.
Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:
gpg --verify gcl-2.6.13.tar.gz.sig
The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:
pub dsa1024 2002-08-23 [SCA]
F1B0 68F9 933A AC36 2A30 A795 7331 B5C0 57F0 45DC
uid [ unknown] Camm Maguire <camm@debian.org>
uid [ unknown] Camm Maguire <camm@enhanced.com>
If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
gpg --recv-keys F1B068F9933AAC362A30A7957331B5C057F045DC
As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:
wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify gcl-2.6.13.tar.gz.sig
--
Camm Maguire camm@maguirefamily.org
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." -- Baha'u'llah