RELEASE NOTES FOR 2.5.1: ======================== The GNU Common Lisp (GCL) development team is pleased to release Version 2.5.1, the first major release since the untimely death of the former maintainer Dr William Schelter over a year ago. This release is dedicated to his memory. The project is now hosted on http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcl/ and is maintained and developed by a team of thirteen programmers. Our home page lives at http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/. This release stabilizes the CLtL1 compliant build of GCL on most major Unices including 11 Debian Linux 64 and 32 bit architectures and modern versions of Microsoft Windows (TM). A rapidly progressing, partially ANSI compliant version is also available on the Linux platforms. GCL plays a substantial role in development of the Maxima computer algebra system (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/), ACL2, a computational logic system (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/), and the forthcoming public release of the Axiom computer algebra system.. The compiler is a descendant of the famous KCL and AKCL Common Lisp compilers and is licensed under version two of the GNU Library General Public License. As with any Lisp system GCL is a lot of fun to work with. We welcome all comments and feedback. Developers are particularly welcome too. You will find that the project offers a wide variety of challenges on various platforms to anyone with an interest in compilers, low level C programming or Common Lisp. ----- Features: * Compiles itself, maxima, and acl2, passing all tests, on 11 Debian GNU/Linux platforms (i386, sparc, powerpc, s390, ia64, alpha, mips, mipsel, hppa, arm, and m68k), Sparc Solaris, and recent Windows systems. * Compilation to native object code. Lisp disassembly shows intermediate C source and native assembler. * Native code relocation on all supported platforms except alpha, mips, mipsel, ia64, and hppa. * Can save its running memory image to a file on all systems where native object code relocation is supported, thus producing standalone executables. * Compiles Lisp function calls to C function calls with inlined arguments, when function proclamation/declamations are made. * Quite fast, particularly if one pre-allocates memory to be commensurate with that typically available on modern computer systems. (see below) * A foreign function interface as flexible in principle as the C interface. * Socket support via streams * Support for numbers of arbitrary precision via the GNU Multiprecision Library. If you build GCL on your own system, multiprecision numerical support will make use of ISA extension instructions available on your system for maximum large number performance. * An exact garbage collector with no (known) leaks. * An ANSI mode on Unix systems which passes approximately 97% of the ANSI compliance tests currently developed for the project. On Debian GNU/Linux systems, this mode can be selected by setting the GCL_ANSI environment variable to any non-empty string. See /usr/share/doc/gcl/test_results on Debian GNU/Linux systems. * An MPI extension for cluster computing support. See the website for details. * A long history of leveraging GCC compiler technology for use in production lisp applications. ----- GCL is one of the oldest Lisp systems still in use, and as such has served as the basis for large lisp applications when computers were much more limited than they are today, particularly in terms of available memory. Considerable effort was therefore made in the past to keep the memory image as small as possible. As of the present time, the GCL team has not tuned the default memory allocation scheme to be more in line with modern systems. One can therefore often get significant performance increases by preallocating memory, as in for example (progn (si::allocate 'cons 10000 t) (si::allocate 'fixnum 200 t) (si::allocate 'symbol 100 t) (si::allocate-relocatable-pages 2000 t) (si::allocate 'cfun 1000 t)) Optimal values will no doubt vary by application and machine. One user/developer reports effects of the following magnitude when using preallocation: ######## Take a look on some funny numbers below. This is time and RAM required to compute ratsimp((x+y+z)^300)$ on Linux AthlonXP 2400+. For GCL run time is in the form T - G = N, where T is the total time as shown by showtime:true; G is total GC tome and N is run time without GC. Lisp Time RAM RAM RAM [sec] before max after T - G = N [Mb] [Mb] [Mb] ===================================================== CLISP 4.6 5.5 29 16 CMUCL 1.6 6.5 31 31 GCL class 5.9 - 5.2 = 0.7 8 24 24 GCL ansi 9.5 - 8.9 = 0.6 9.5 29 29 GCL class 1.0 - 0.4 = 0.6 24 31 31 GCL ansi 1.1 - 0.6 = 0.5 25 32 32 GCL class 0.7 - 0.1 = 0.6 48 55 55 GCL ansi 0.5 - 0.0 = 0.5 49 56 56 ==================================================== ######## TO DO: 1) Full ANSI compliance 2) Native optimized blas support 3) Integrate MPI support 4) GCL as a suported GCC front end. 5) Performance/memory optimization