Under the gathering storms of the Fall 2020, we are pleased to release ABCL 1.8.0 as the Ninth major revision of the implementation.
This Ninth Edition of the implementation now supports building and running on the recently released openjdk15 platform. This release is intended as the last major release to support the openjdk6 openjdk7, and openjdk8 platforms, for with abcl-2.0.0 we intend to move the minimum platform to openjdk11 or better in order to efficiently implement atomic memory compare and swap operations.
With this release, the implementation of the EXT:JAR-PATHNAME and EXT:URL-PATHNAME subtypes of cl:PATHNAME has been overhauled to the point that arbitrary references to ZIP archives within archives now work for read-only stream operations (CL:PROBE-FILE CL:TRUENAME, CL:OPEN, CL:LOAD, CL:FILE-WRITE-DATE, CL:DIRECTORY, and CL:MERGE-PATHNAMES). The previous versions of the implementation relied on the ability for java.net.URL to open streams of an archive within an archive, behavior that was silently dropped after Java 5, and consequently hasn't worked on common platforms supported by the Bear in a long time. The overhaul of the implementation restores the feasibility of accessing fasls from within jar files. Interested parties may examine the ASDF-JAR contrib for a recipe for packaging and accessing such artifacts. Please consult the "Beyond ANSI: Pathnames" Section 4.2 of the User Manual for further details for how namestrings and components of PATHNAME objects have been revised.
A more comprehensive list of CHANGES is available with the source.
