ECL 0.9h released
Written by jjgarcia on 2005-11
Apart from important bugs being fixed, this release makes slightly better use of the Boehm-Weiser garbage collector, thereby reducing memory use. Typically, in a linux/x86 box this can be as little as 6Mb of which 2.7Mb are shared libraries (including both lisp and C libraries).
Another highlight of this release are the improvements in the foreign function interface. First of all, callbacks are now supported for all architectures using compiled code. Second, we have new, nonportable code for dynamically accessing C/C++ functions in shared libraries, as well as creating callbacks on the fly. Due to the need for assembly code, this is currently supported on the Intel-x86 architecture only, but can be extended to other ports.
Also of interests are the ASDF routines introduced by Michael Goffioul for building unified FASL files, shared libraries and standalone executables up from a single system definition file. For a simple example see ecls/examples/asdf/readme.lisp
Finally, we have added a new platform to our list: OpenBSD. This port benefits from the changes in ECL's own conservative garbage collector, which, at the cost of being slightly slower, is the only one supported on this operating system.
