[Ecls-list] News about release and more

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Many thanks for the kind offer.  After the build, if you do

      make check

you will get the (currently minimal) testsuite run.

OpenAxiom has a test system that currently involves too much human
intelligence, but I'm looking for alternatives -- my other experience
are with DejaGNu and QMTest.  I'm not satisfied with either.

What kind of timing are you looking for?


>
> 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.

Wow! Fantastic.

>
> 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.


The new ECL-based OpenAxiom build is progressing far beyond
the last reported failure point, so I think you have green light as
as far as OpenAxiom is concerned.

Many thanks for your effort.

-- Gaby