[Ecls-list] News about release and more

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

I have fixed a lot of typos affecting different parts of ECL: handling
of C streams, compiling certain global function calls, compilation of
FSET, etc.

Right now ECL seems to be able to build OpenAxiom, though I really do
not know what to do with it :-) If you pass me a way to run tests and
timings of OpenAxiom I will gladly add them to the database of
automated builds that my computer performs and you will be able to
monitor the status of both's programs compatibility.

There has been a major reorganization in the code for building
optional modules, and in particular ECL can now be shipped in a mode
that does not require a C compiler.

First of all, modules now can be built as loadable files, as built in
extensions that form part of the shared library or not built at all.
For instance, if you want to add ASDF support you may choose between
--with-asdf=yes (default), --with-asdf=builtin (no need to load the
module) and --without-asdf or --with-asdf=no (do not build it).

A new module that we now have is BYTECMP. This module uses the
bytecodes interpreter to produce text files that have been
precompiled. This clever trick of using ECL's minimal compilation
system allows you to ship ECL as a standalone program where COMPILE
and COMPILE-FILE work, but which will not have the full speed of a
native compiler.

The most interesting use of this is combining flags in the following form
   --disable-shared --with-bytecmp=builtin --with-cmp=no
The resulting statically linked file will be a full lisp image which
supports compilation to bytecode and, as I said, does not require a C
compiler around. Unfortunately bytecodes compilation means C-INLINE
and some other FFI forms no longer work. Furthermore, the bytecodes
compiler currently does not support exporting compiled code with
objects that do not have a printed representation. This should be
worked out in a near future (help welcome).

If everybody agrees, I will prepare a release in a couple of days.

Juanjo

P.S.: Outside preparing the release and minor email exchanges you may
consider me mostly off-line for the following days.

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28009 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com