[Ecls-list] [ANN] ECL v.9.10.1

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

Announcement of ECL v9.10.1
===========================

ECL stands for Embeddable Common-Lisp. The ECL project aims to produce an
implementation of the Common-Lisp language which complies to the ANSI X3J13
definition of the language.

The term embeddable refers to the fact that ECL includes a lisp to C compiler,
which produces libraries (static or dynamic) that can be called from C
programs. Furthermore, ECL can produce standalone executables from your lisp
code and can itself be linked to your programs as a shared library.

ECL supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris (at
least v. 9), Microsoft Windows and OSX, running on top of the Intel, Sparc,
Alpha and PowerPC processors. Porting to other architectures should be rather
easy.

ECL is currently hosted at Common-Lisp.net and SourceForge. The home page of
the project is http://ecls.sourceforge.net, and in it you will find source code
releases, a CVS tree and some useful documentation.

Known issues
============

This release features a new model for handling signals, which is a bit more
compatible with both POSIX and Windows' expectations. This involves changes
for instance in the toplevel, regarding how Ctrl-C (SIGINT) is handled: this
event is captured by a separate thread and, if more than one thread is present,
it will enter the debugger and give the user a choice on which thread to
interrupt. However, as all improvements, this may need polishing, rounding a
few corners, etc. Feedback and bug reports are welcome.

ECL is also aggressively moving towards supporting threads everywhere. However
this support is not entirely possible with older releases of the
garbage collector.
Until we transition to the upcoming release of the Boehm-Weiser library, the
following problems persist:

- NetBSD and Open only work in single-threaded mode because
   1) the version of the garbage collector shipped with it does not
      support GC_register_my_thread and
   2) the version of the garbage collector shipped with ECL fails to
      build (it gets locked when looking for a working fork())

- The mingw32 port only builds in multithreaded mode when using the unstable
  release of the garbage collector (v7.2)

Changes since last release
==========================

See file src/CHANGELOG or browse it online

http://ecls.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ecls/ecl/src/CHANGELOG?view=markup

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com