Quicklisp helps focus ABCL development

One of the great side effects from Quicklisp to us as the developers of an implementation, is the fact that for the first time since my last 10 years of lisp hacking, statistics have been published regarding system downloads.

 Within the ABCL community, this list has been picked up as a signal from users telling us what they find important: Starting from the top, we've started compiling quicklisp provided systems and fixing the issues we found. Mark Evenson is working to fix bordeaux-threads on ABCL. Ville Voutilainen implemented an implementation-specific extension to DIRECTORY in order not to resolve symlinks required by Quicklisp itself. While Erik Huelsmann has been working to implement trivial-garbage required functionalities weak references, object finalizers and weak hash tables.

ABCL 0.25.0 released

On behalf of the developers of ABCL (Armed Bear Common Lisp) I'm glad to be able to announce the 0.25.0 release.

ABCL is a Common Lisp implementation implemented in Java and running on the JVM, featuring both an interpreter and a compiler. The compiler targets the JVM directly meaning that its output is runnable JVM bytecode. The fact that ABCL is written in Java allows for relatively easy embedding in larger
applications. For integration with existing applications ABCL implements JSR 223: Java scripting API.


This release features - among lots of other things - a major refactoring of the compiler to be more robust in light of Java class file verification and object instantiation (MAKE-INSTANCE) performace improvements.
You can find the full release notes at:

http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/release-notes-0.25.shtml

and the list of changes at:

http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/browser/trunk/abcl/CHANGES


If you have questions regarding use or licensing, or you find issues, please report back to the development list:

armedbear-devel at common-lisp dot net


Source distribution archives can be downloaded in ZIP or gzipped tar form:

http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/releases/0.25.0/abcl-src-0.25.0.tar.gz
http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/releases/0.25.0/abcl-src-0.25.0.zip

Signatures are available under:
http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/0.25.0/releases/abcl-src-0.25.0.tar.gz.asc
http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/0.25.0/releases/abcl-src-0.25.0.zip.asc



In addition, binaries are also available:

http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/releases/0.25.0/abcl-bin-0.25.0.tar.gz
http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/releases/0.25.0/abcl-bin-0.25.0.zip

With associated signatures:
http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/releases/abcl-bin-0.25.0.tar.gz.asc
http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/releases/abcl-bin-0.25.0.zip.asc


Finally, this is the first release to be also officially hosted on the Maven Central repository, and thus usable without hassle in Maven projects. Refer to the relevant wiki page for details: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/wiki/MavenSupport

Bootstrapping Quicklisp on ABCL

The other day, I decided that - as many others have done before me - I'd give Quicklisp a go. Being on Windows (and ABCL), I was expecting a bumpy ride.

Turns out I was completely wrong: all I needed was a simple
CL-USER> (load "http://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp")   [!!]

Quicklisp downloaded all its data nicely into my home directory (which - on ABCL/Win - is C:\Users\, C:\Users\Erik in my case). When I need a new ABCL session, for whatever reason, the only thing I need to type to get quicklisp loaded from my local install is:
CL-USER> (load "c:/users/erik/quicklisp/setup.lisp")

That's it. That's all. No bumpy ride. No ABCL issues. It Just Works!

Thanks Zach!



[!!] Warning: you may not want to do it that way, since it will execute the code from the web UNSEEN by you; you won't have a chance to see any security attacks on your PC by anybody slipping in a file which contains the lisp equivalent of "FORMAT C: /Y"