Greetings! This is to announce the pre-release of GCL 2.7.0. gcl27 packages should appear on debian and derivatives shortly. One can compile git branch Version_2_7_0pre in the meantime.
This branch represents a major overhaul of the system, and will likely need to age in the wild before becoming the latest official release. Simultaneous installs of gcl26 and gcl27 will be supported on all debian systems. I will try to summarize the developments in several emails to come. Most notable developments are ansi compliance, extensive improvements to the compiler and type system, and automatic support for function signatures and function-lambda-expression related facilities. Also of note is that the compiler itself is slower, as it is doing much more, but the code produced is much better. Some of the heavy lifting can be skipped in the future by making better use of the speed optimization declaration. I have tried to keep gcl overhead less than the accompanying gcc overhead -- right now we are at a ratio of about 2/3. The system compile time itself is also longer, but largely unnecessarily so. We attempt to implement all standard functions in lisp, eval the source to compile at safety 3, then use the result to compile at safety 0. This bootstrapping can no doubt be improved as time goes on, but thus far it has seemed low priority. Rebuilding the system with its optimized self takes about 10 min on a modern laptop. Bug reports and feedback are most welcome, but please try to boil these down to the lisp level. I have not yet tried building the standard programs with this version on a production basis, but will ensure that all are supported at existing performane or better before making a standard release. Take care, -- Camm Maguire c...@maguirefamily.org ========================================================================== "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." -- Baha'u'llah
