GNU Common Lisp - News
GCL 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 are released
Item posted by Camm Maguire <camm> on Tue 27 Aug 2013 09:16:59 PM UTC.
Greetings! The GCL team is happy to announce a pair of stable releases.
The 2.6.8 release represents several years worth of fixes and
enhancements, notably a great extension of GCL's native object file
relocation support.
2.6.9 is released concurrently as it contains a number of structural
improvements which, while passing all our tests, may cause issues for
some people. These improvements are chiefly a two word cons, immediate
fixnum support, word sized fixnums (64bits on 64bit machines), and a
'dynamic maxpage' implementation, which removes all compile time limits
to the heap size and auxiliary typing and marking tables. 2.6.9 will
attempt to manage the heap given the apparent constraints of the running
system, with the goal of eliminating allocation failures and handling
out of memory conditions in advance with a modicum of grace. As this
involves a runtime startup probe of brk, which has varying degrees of
significance in different operating systems, one might still experience
overallocation of memory (notably on hurd). In such cases,
gcl -eval '(si::set-log-maxpage-bound x)'
will limit the heap to 2^x bytes as a workaround.
All gcl, maxima, acl2, axiom, and hol88 builds and self tests pass for
the following platforms, with noted exceptions(*) itemized below:
debian: amd64 armel armhf hurd-i386 i386 ia64 kfreebsd-amd64
kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390 s390x sparc
debian-ports: alpha hppa m68k powerpcspe ppc64 sh4 sparc64 x32
macosx, windows
*exceptions
1) all systems use native object relocation by default now but ia64 and
ppc64, which use dlopen. Thus there is a typical limit of 1024 files
that can be loaded, and the current acl2 build exceeds this limit. As
this bound is runtime configurable with root access, this is not an
insurmountable obstacle.
2) kfreebsd-i386 systems do not appear to allow one to brk more than
500M of memory, and the acl2 certification process needs 1Gb. A
solution here is as yet unknown but may be forthcoming shortly.
3) windows builds have been performed on win95. There is an as yet
unidentified runtime error running the 2.6.9 images on win7. More
information here will be forthcoming shortly.
Windows installers can be found at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcl.
4) macosx builds have been tested on snow leopard. More recent versions
appear to have a linker bug which prevents configure from detecting the
provided profil() routine. A workaround here should be to
echo "#undef NO_PROFILE >>h/config.h"
after configure and before make.
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