[asdf-devel] ASDF 3 news

[Faré]

Getting closer to release. The codebase is stable now, and I'm just
making minor adjustments. Now at 2.26.164.

I'm going to release 2.27 as soon as all tests pass on all
implementations. The magic feature is #+asdf3, and 2.27 should be
considered a pre-release. Hopefully by next month, after some testing,
we can declare the next one to be ASDF 3.0.

There were previously performance issues, with ASDF 2.26.152 being
over 37 times slower than 2.26 at making a plan for iolib than it was
before (3s vs .08s). After a day spent optimizing away a lot of
truename queries and other pathname computations, ASDF is back at
being 70% slower with default settings (while doing much more work
behind the scene), and slightly faster if you disable all truename
queries via (setf *resolve-symlinks* nil) -- but goodbye linkfarms if
you do.

After the last round of upgrade cleanups, hot upgrade now works
without punting on recent versions of ABCL or CMUCL. But still not on
CLISP. There seem to be various optimizations in CLISP FASLs that
defeat everything I've tried so far except punting by renaming away
the ASDF package as the very first thing.

Many thanks to Stelian Ionescu, Stas Boukarev, Anton Vodonosov and
Robert Goldman for their help with testing.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
You may easily play a joke on a man who likes to argue — agree with him.
                — Edgar Waston Howe