Steel Bank Common Lisp

Provides an integrated native compiler, a debugger, and many extensions.

Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) was tested on various POSIX platforms and Windows.

What is new in this release:

• Enhancement:
• sb-bsd-sockets now has basic support for IPv6
• An sb-unicode package has been added, containing many functions related to handling Unicode text
• The reader now normalizes symbols to Normalization Form KC (NFKC). This behavior can be disabled with SB-EXT:READTABLE-NORMALIZATION
• A style-warning is signaled if OPTIMIZE declarations multiply specify a quality with differing values.
• Bug fixes:
• Conservatively pointed to pages wipe out unused dwords so that they cannot act as false roots in turn.
• The walker's handling of lexical variable and symbol-macro bindings is improved
• HANDLER-{BIND,CASE} no longer drop into ldb when a clause contains an undefined condition type; regression in 1.1.19
• In interpreted code, inequality predicates did not type-check arguments that weren't examined, and a 1-argument use of MIN or MAX accepted a complex number.
• APROPOS and APROPOS-LIST handle inherited symbols correctly.

What is new in version 1.2.12:

• Enhancement:
• sb-bsd-sockets now has basic support for IPv6
• An sb-unicode package has been added, containing many functions related to handling Unicode text
• The reader now normalizes symbols to Normalization Form KC (NFKC). This behavior can be disabled with SB-EXT:READTABLE-NORMALIZATION
• A style-warning is signaled if OPTIMIZE declarations multiply specify a quality with differing values.
• Bug fixes:
• Conservatively pointed to pages wipe out unused dwords so that they cannot act as false roots in turn.
• The walker's handling of lexical variable and symbol-macro bindings is improved
• HANDLER-{BIND,CASE} no longer drop into ldb when a clause contains an undefined condition type; regression in 1.1.19
• In interpreted code, inequality predicates did not type-check arguments that weren't examined, and a 1-argument use of MIN or MAX accepted a complex number.
• APROPOS and APROPOS-LIST handle inherited symbols correctly.

What is new in version 1.2.11:

• Enhancement:
• sb-bsd-sockets now has basic support for IPv6
• An sb-unicode package has been added, containing many functions related to handling Unicode text
• The reader now normalizes symbols to Normalization Form KC (NFKC). This behavior can be disabled with SB-EXT:READTABLE-NORMALIZATION
• A style-warning is signaled if OPTIMIZE declarations multiply specify a quality with differing values.
• Bug fixes:
• Conservatively pointed to pages wipe out unused dwords so that they cannot act as false roots in turn.
• The walker's handling of lexical variable and symbol-macro bindings is improved
• HANDLER-{BIND,CASE} no longer drop into ldb when a clause contains an undefined condition type; regression in 1.1.19
• In interpreted code, inequality predicates did not type-check arguments that weren't examined, and a 1-argument use of MIN or MAX accepted a complex number.
• APROPOS and APROPOS-LIST handle inherited symbols correctly.

What is new in version 1.2.10:

• Enhancement:
• sb-bsd-sockets now has basic support for IPv6
• An sb-unicode package has been added, containing many functions related to handling Unicode text
• The reader now normalizes symbols to Normalization Form KC (NFKC). This behavior can be disabled with SB-EXT:READTABLE-NORMALIZATION
• A style-warning is signaled if OPTIMIZE declarations multiply specify a quality with differing values.
• Bug fixes:
• Conservatively pointed to pages wipe out unused dwords so that they cannot act as false roots in turn.
• The walker's handling of lexical variable and symbol-macro bindings is improved
• HANDLER-{BIND,CASE} no longer drop into ldb when a clause contains an undefined condition type; regression in 1.1.19
• In interpreted code, inequality predicates did not type-check arguments that weren't examined, and a 1-argument use of MIN or MAX accepted a complex number.
• APROPOS and APROPOS-LIST handle inherited symbols correctly.

What is new in version 1.2.0:

• Bug fix:
• read-time-eval backquote context mixup.
• Enhancement:
• When SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE fails due multiple threads, the report of the signaled conditions lists currently running threads.
• Ported to ARM Linux.
• sb-gmp contrib has been updated.
• New contrib sb-mpfr.

What is new in version 1.1.11:

• Support building the manual under texinfo version 5.
• Windows builds no longer display the "Kitten of Death" message. A warning is instead appended to the regular banner, and may be muted with --noinform.
• Support building under new linker handling of syscalls under NetBSD.

What is new in version 1.1.10:

• Enhancement:
• ASDF has been updated to 3.0.2.
• Optimization:
• On x86 and x86-64, integer negation forms like (- x) are now recognized in modular arithmetic contexts, and compile to native negate, rather than going through bignums only to keep the low bits.
• Stack frames are packed more efficiently on x86oids, which ought to reduce the frequency of Methuselahn conservative references (it certainly helps with gc.impure.lisp / BUG-936304 on x86).

What is new in version 1.1.9:

• New feature:
• The contrib SB-GMP links with libgmp at runtime to speed up arithmetic on bignums and ratios.
• Enhancement:
• Disassemble now annotates some previously missing static functions, like LENGTH.
• clean.sh now also cleans doc/internals.
• SB-EXT:PRINT-SYMBOL-WITH-PREFIX can be used within ~// to print a symbol with a package prefix.
• The debugger and backtracing are more robust against buggy PRINT-OBJECT methods.
• Optimization:
• Calls to static functions on x86-64 use less instructions.

What is new in version 1.1.6:

• Enhancement:
• The continuable error when defknown-ing over extant fndb entries can be ignored by passing :overwrite-fndb-silently t as a keyword argument to sb-c:defknown (after attributes). Useful to allow defknown to be re-loaded. Use with :allow-other-keys t for backward compatibility.
• Optimization:
• Compiler is much faster in compiling SVREF and (SETF SVREF) forms.
• Bug fix:
• Prevent a make-array transform from modifying source forms causing problems for inlined code.
• clear-output calls the correct gray stream routine.
• An error is signalled for an invalid format modifier: ~<~@>.

What is new in version 1.1.3:

• The MSI installer support for Windows now uses Windows Installer XML at least version 3.5 and includes various usability improvements.
• The sb-bsd-sockets contrib now supports non-blocking-mode on Windows.
• The Windows backend now supports the x86-64 platform.
• fasls are now once again directly executable (on platforms supporting shebang lines, with a suitably-installed sbcl).

What is new in version 1.1.1:

• Optimization:
• The SPARC backend now supports the precise generational (GENCGC) garbage collection. Enabled by default on Solaris/SPARC and Linux/SPARC.
• The compiler no longer rotates loops in some cases where this transformation actually lead to worse code being generated.
• Enhancement:
• Add experimental support for the SB-THREAD feature and the timer facility on Windows. Threads are enabled by default, and this version of SBCL is considered to be the last and final release to officially support building with threads disabled.
• Bug fix:
• SB-CLTL2:MACROEXPAND-ALL correctly handles shadowing of symbol-macros by lexical bindings.
• Stack allocation was prevented by high DEBUG declaration in several cases.
• SB-EXT:GC-LOGFILE signaled an error when no logfile was set.
• PARSE-NATIVE-NAMESTRING performed non-native parsing when :JUNK-ALLOWED was true.

What is new in version 1.1.0:

• Enhancement:
• New variable, sb-ext:*disassemble-annotate* for controlling source annotation of DISASSEMBLE output. Defaults to T.
• TIMEOUT arguments added to WITH-MUTEX and WITH-RECURSIVE-LOCK, and WAIT-P argument added to WITH-RECURSIVE-LOCK.
• enhancement: SB-EXT:ATOMIC-PUSH and SB-EXT:ATOMIC-POP allow atomic operations on list heads.
• Optional features (not enabled by default) allow the use of signals for inter-thread synchronization to be reduced on certain supported platforms (currently Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD on x86 and x86-64).

What is new in version 1.0.58:

• Implicit generic function warnings now specify the package in which the new generic function is being created.
• SB-EXT:ATOMIC-UPDATE makes it easy to perform non-destructive updates of CAS-able places (similar to Clojure's swap!).
• Run-program no longer decodes and re-encodes environment when :environment argument is not provided. (#985904)
• Errors during compiler-macro expansion no longer cause runtime errors, only a compile-time warning, otherwise behaving as if the compiler macro had declined to expand.
• On x86-64, code alignment of block headers is done with multi-byte NOPs now instead of repetitions of the single-byte NOP.
• MAP-INTO is substantially faster when the target sequence is of unknown type; mapping into lists is no longer O(N^2). (thanks to James M. Lawrence)
• The compiler no longer heap-conses to check exits in cases where the exit function is dynamic extent, or when it can prove the exit function cannot escape.
• SB-SEQUENCE:DOSEQUENCE is faster on vectors of unknown element type, and vectors that aren't SIMPLE-ARRAYs.

What is new in version 1.0.57:

• Redesigned protocol for quitting SBCL. SB-EXT:EXIT is the new main entry point, SB-EXT:QUIT is deprecated.
• Additions to the SB-THREAD API: RETURN-FROM-THREAD, ABORT-THREAD, MAIN-THREAD-P, and MAIN-THREAD.
• FASL loading no longer grabs the world-lock.
• GENCGC reclaims space more aggressively when objects being allocated are a large fraction of the total available heap space. (#936304)
• Backtraces show the correct number of arguments for frames called with too many arguments.
• Support for abort(3), exit(3), and _exit(2) has been added to SB-POSIX.

What is new in version 1.0.56:

• Fixed copy-structure.
• SBCL can now be built using Clang.
• ASDF has been updated 2.20.
• Fixed compiler errors when weakening hairy integer types.

What is new in version 1.0.40:

• Bug fix: readdir now works on :inode64 darwin builds.
• Bug fix: Name conflicts between symbols passed as arguments to a single call to IMPORT no longer add multiple symbols with the same name to the package (detectable via DO-SYMBOLS).
• Bug fix: support building without the dlshim on darwin x86 and x86-64.
• Bug fix: TRACE :ENCAPSULATE NIL now works on ppc/linux.

What is new in version 1.0.33:

• New port: support added for x86-64 NetBSD.
• Improvement: support O_LARGEFILE access to files larger than 2GB on x86-64/linux. (thanks to Daniel Janus; launchpad bug #453080)
• New feature: SB-INTROSPECT:WHO-SPECIALIZES-DIRECTLY to get a list of definitions for methods specializing on the passed class itself.
• New feature: SB-INTROSPECT:WHO-SPECIALIZES-GENERALLY to get a list of definitions for methods specializing on the passed class itself, or on subclasses of it.
• New build flag: :sb-xref-for-internals; SBCL will collect xref information about itself during the build (e.g. for M-? in Slime), if this flag is in customize-target-features.lisp. This will increase the core by about 5-6mb, though, so it's mostly interesting to SBCL
• developers.

What is new in version 1.0.31:

• Improvement: stack allocation is should now be possible in all nested inlining cases: failure to stack allocate when equivalent code is manually open coded is now considered a bug.
• Improvements related to Unicode bugs
• New feature: experimental :EMIT-CFASL parameter to COMPILE-FILE can be used to output toplevel compile-time effects into a separate .CFASL file.
• Optimization: COERCE to VECTOR, STRING, SIMPLE-STRING and recognizable one-dimenstional subtypes of ARRAY is upto 70% faster when the coercion is actually needed.
• Optimization: TRUNCATE on known single- and double-floats is upto 25% faster.
• Optimization: division of floating point numbers by constants uses multiplication by reciprocal when an exact reciprocal exists.
• Optimization: multiplication of single- and double-floats floats by constant two has been optimized.
• Optimization: ARRAY-IN-BOUNDS-P is resolved at compile-time when sufficient type information is available.
• Optimization: SLOT-VALUE and (SETF SLOT-VALUE) with constant slot names on known structure objects are as efficient as defstruct generated accessors.