[ANN] CHICKEN 6.0.0 rerlease candidate available

Hello everyone,

We are happy to announce the first official release candidate of the upcoming
CHICKEN 6.0.0.

CHICKEN 6.0.0rc3 is now available at this location:
http://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2026/05/12/chicken-6.0.0rc3.tar.gz

The SHA256 sum of that tarball is
814a1c5bbfe79b3997b44d0311f8a53ea1f07f7125c5ee2cd653744f4974280b

This is a major release with extensive changes to make CHICKEN R7RS (small)
conformant, and with full support for UNICODE characters and strings.
The modules exporting some existing library procedures have been
restructured to better match the R7RS standard, which means that
existing code may have to adjust import statements accordingly.

In addition to these structural changes, the release contains
many bugfixes and improvements. Windows support has been slightly
improved, as we have settled on a single toolchain (w64devkit)
to reduce maintenance overhead. The foreign function interface
now supports passing structs and unions directly and building
the system with specific settings has been simplified by adding
a more traditional "configure" script.

The complete list of changes since version 5.4.0 is available here:
http://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2026/05/12/NEWS

Many thanks to the countless users who have contributed bugfixes,
documentation work and helpful suggestions. 

A lot of eggs have already been ported and in many cases porting existing
code just means adding one or two imports. If you face problems
porting existing library or application code, then please don't hesitate 
to ask us if you need support.

Please give it a test and report your findings to the mailing list or
to our IRC channel.

Here's a suggested test procedure:

  $ ./configure --prefix <some dir>
  $ make install check

To test it more extensively, you can install and build a set of
eggs, ideally with lots of dependencies to stress the system a 
bit more (note that this will not work on Windows, due to missing
system APIs and libraries):

  $ <some dir>/bin/chicken-install pastiche

Enter "./configure --help" to see a list of options that can be used
to tweak the build and installation.

If you can, please let us know the following information about the
environment you tested the RC tarball on:

Operating system: (e.g., FreeBSD 14.0, Debian 12, Windows 11)
Hardware platform: (e.g., x86, x86-64, PPC)
C Compiler: (e.g., GCC 11.3.0, clang 16.0.6)
Installation works?: yes or no
Tests work?: yes or no
Installation of eggs works?: yes or no

Thanks in advance!

The CHICKEN Team