What is the best version of ECL to use right now?

[Daniel Kochmański]

Hello Dennis,

On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 20:02 -0400, Dennis Ogbe wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am working on embedding ECL in a reasonably-sized C++ program and I
> have been using v16.1.3 until now, since it seems like this is the
> latest official release.

Yes, 16.1.3 is the latest official release.
> 
> However, it seems like there is a lot of activity and bug fixes in
> the develop branch and I already ran into a few bugs (for example
> [1]) that are fixed in develop, but are not in any release. The
> documentation also seems to overlap more with the develop branch than
> the latest release.

That is also true, we work on the next release and we expect to make
the new one soon™ (only a few tasks has been left over to implement).
> 
> In your opinion, what is the best and most stable ECL version to use
> as of June 2019? I have some reservations about simply picking a
> random commit from a dev branch, so I wanted to reach out and ask
> y'all directly.

There is no good answer for that. While develop branch indeed has many
improvements in form of bug fixes and new (dare I say – exciting)
features it is only loosely tested. Before each release we work hard to
test the release candidate against a big variety of operating systems,
architectures and libraries (cl-test-grid is an invaluable help with
that) and try to fix regressions. If you feel adventurous just pick
develop branch, we do not commit there half-baked things (only stuff
which we are certain about or which was a subject of a peer review /
testing around the thing being changed) - it is fairly stable. But
there is no guarantee that you won't hit some ugly regression we are
not aware of yet. Otherwise you may try to live with 16.1.3 until we
release the new 16.2.0 version – hopefully withing a few months from
now.
> 
> Thanks for all the hard work, this project is great!

That's very kind of you to say that. If it is not a secret what are you
working on?
> 
> [1] https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl/issues/418
> 

Best regards,
Daniel