ECL 12.7.1 released
Written by jjgarcia on 2012-07
Sorry for the multiple posting -- I had some problems with SourceForge news submission today.
Known issues
This release is the first one with the new multithreading library, which no longer relies on the POSIX mutexes, condition variables and semaphores. Instead, ECL makes use of libatomic-ops to implement userspace routines for process communication (mailboxes), resource sharing (locks, condition variables, counting semaphores) and fast spinlocks.
Due to the new implementation, it is likely that some corner cases may appear during use. In this case we would like to ask you to report a reproducible test case to ECL's bug tracker and we will provide a solution as soon as possible, with a new release, if needed.
In addition to this, the following problems persist:
Cygwin's library is still broken: fork/exec fails to reload the cygwin library, or ECL's compiled libraries in a completely random fashion. For this reason we recommend using ext:system instead of ext:run-program in that platform.
In Windows ECL comes with bytecodes compiler by default, because C compilers are normally not avaiable. Unfortunately several libraries out there are not prepared for this. If you plan to use quicklisp and have a C compiler accessible to ECL, you may use (ext:install-c-compiler) to switch back to the Lisp-to-C compiler.
Changes since last release
Some highlights of this release are:
The multithreading library.
Complete support for MOP.
Speed improvements in areas such as slot accessors.
Common Lisp code can now trap and capture Unix interrupts, though the processing is asynchronous for all but the critical ones.
Lots and lots of fixes.
See file src/CHANGELOG or browse it online
http://ecls.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ecls/ecl/src/CHANGELOG?view=markup
