ABCL 1.5.0 released

[Mark Evenson]

We are please to announce that we have released the Sixth Edition of the
Armed Bear Common Lisp implementation as ABCL 1.5.0.

Due to the lack of a publicly available Java 5 implementation, with this
release we drop support for that platform, and henceforth support
running on Java 6, Java 7, and Java 8.

In addition to consolidating eight months of bug fixes, the following
notable features are now also present in the implementation.

The compiler now records more complete debugging information on the
SYS:SOURCE symbol property.

ABCL-INTROSPECT offers improved inspection of backtraces to the point
that local variables may be inspected in Lisp debug frames.  Patches to
SLIME to use this feature are in the process of being merged into the
upstream repository. The OBJECTWEB system allows the user to disassemble
JVM bytecode via dependencies managed by Maven.

JSS now contains a syntax for accessing Java static and member fields.

For declaring dependencies on Java artifacts ABCL-ASDF,  we have added
an experimental syntax to address JRE/JDK artifacts via the ASDF:JDK-JAR
class, as well as the ability to more finely control Maven dependencies
with the  ASDF:MVN-MODULE class.


A complete list of [changes][] may be viewed in the source repository.

[changes]: http://abcl.org/svn/tags/1.5.0/CHANGES

Binaries for this release may either be downloaded directly from
http://abcl.org/releases/1.5.0,  retrieved from the distributed Maven
POM graph, or run from Docker via

        docker run -it easye/abcl:1.5.0

Many thanks to all who have contributed to nurturing the Bear's
execution of conforming ANSI Common Lisp on the Java Virtual Machine.

-- 
"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."