SBCL 0.7.8 released (and some other misc. news items as well)

SBCL 0.7.8 has been released.

Besides the items in the NEWS file, recent developments include:
  * Alexey Dejneka is now registered as a SourceForge developer, which
    essentially means that he does CVS commits directly now.
  * Dan Barlow's new bug database, 
      <http://test.ox.telent.net/entomotomy/index>
    is not in production yet, so we're still just using the BUGS file
    in the sources and coordinating with CMU CL informally via email
    and IRC, but it's working well.
  * Christophe Rhodes has code to check for type mismatches like
    (MAP '(VECTOR 3) #'PLUSP '(1 2)). It was even checked into the
    sources around 0.7.7.33, but was taken out before 0.7.8 because it
    caused some performance problems. The performance problems seem
    fixable, so this functionality, based on a slightly modified
    version of this code, is likely to be in a future SBCL.

from the NEWS file:
changes in sbcl-0.7.8 relative to sbcl-0.7.7:
  * A beta-quality port to the mips architecture running Linux,
    based on the old CMUCL backend, has been made.  It has been tested
    on a big-endian kernel, and works sufficiently well to be able to
    rebuild itself; it has not been tested in little-endian mode.
  * fixed an inconsistency between gencgc.c and purify.c which made
    dumping/loading .core files unreliable
  * fixed bug 120a: The compiler now deals correctly with IFs where
    the consequent is the same as the alternative, instead of
    misderiving the return type. (thanks to Alexey Dejneka)
  * fixed bug 113: Logical pathnames are now dumpable (the logical
    host is resolved at load-time, throwing an error if it is not
    found).
  * fixed bug 174: FORMAT's error message is slightly clearer when a
    non-printing character is used in a format directive.
  * fixed several bugs in compiler checking of type declarations, i.e.
    violations of the Python "declarations are assertions" principle
    (thanks to Alexey Dejneka)
  * fixed several bugs in PCL's error checking (thanks to Gerd
    Moellmann)
  * fixed bug: printing of FILE-ERROR (thanks to Antonio
    Martinez-Shotton)
  * fixed bug in compilation of functions as first class values
    (thanks to Antonio Martinez-Shotton)
  * The compiler's handling TYPE-ERRORs which it can prove will
    inevitably happen at runtime has been cleaned up and corrected
    in several ways. (thanks to Alexey Dejneka)
  * improved argument type checking for various basic arithmetic
    operations (MAX, +, LOGXOR, etc.) which have had so much TLC
    lavished on them in the past that they can be compiled in many
    ways in different special cases
  * fixed bug 181: compiler checks validity of user supplied type
    specifiers
  * cleaned up code flushing in optimization: Function calls which
    should signal errors for safety purposes (e.g. which ANSI says
    should signal errors when their arguments are of incorrect type)
    are no longer optimized away.
  * added new extension: SB-DEBUG:BACKTRACE-AS-LIST
  * incremented fasl file version number, because changes in the
    implementation of sequence functions like COERCE caused 
    internal utility functions like COERCE-TO-SIMPLE-VECTOR (used
    in old inline expansions) to become undefined. (Actually these
    changes were later undone, so we might very well be binary
    compatible with 0.7.7 after all, but leaving the version number
    incremented seemed like the simplest and most conservative
    thing to do.)

-- 
William Harold Newman <[email protected]>
"Stay away from my house, you freak!"
  -- <http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html>
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