[armedbear-devel] Development status recap

[Erik Huelsmann]

A lot of different efforts are going on at the moment. So I thought
I'd try to write down the efforts and their status as far as I know.
Both to be informational, or to comment upon to correct my
understanding.


1. The Gray streams effort
  We're slowly progressing on this issue: a design was agreed upon and
Ville has added that to the wiki. Next steps include setting up the
right java and lisp code for the structure ANSI-STREAM to hold
closures used for I/O processing. Basically this design was taken from
SBCL.

2. Better inlining of lambda functions and inlined named functions
  By inlining lambda functions as much as we can, we can reduce the
number of reflection calls required to instantiate all our function
classes. Alessio is working on creating a function argument matcher
which binds the newest PARSE-LAMBDA-LIST on trunk with the function
call arguments in order to generate a LET* form instead of a function
call.

3. Pathnames as a way to address JAR file content
  ABCL extends the pathname scheme in CL to address resources in JAR
files. However, this support was limited to a small number of
pathnames related functions. Mark Evenson is working to improve the
situation.

4. DEFINE-METHOD-COMBINATION
  Mark Evenson started on this issue; however post-poned it to work on
item (3). Feel free to pick it up!

5. Local functions in same class file as the function they're defined in
  Some time ago, I started working on a general class file writer to
make it possible to store local functions inside the same class as
the function in which they're defined. This effort is progressing very
slowly; it's more of a side project to other improvements in the
project. It has the same goal as (2): reduction of the number of
required reflection calls to get our classes loaded.


Bye,


Erik.