This message announces the general beta release of CMU Common Lisp 15d for
SPARCstation or Sun4 machines running SunOS.
Except for Miles Bader's portable disassembler and a few minor performance
enhancements, this is mostly a bug-fix release. We've been working on ANSI
complaince, foreign function interface and more advanced compiler
optimizations, but we're not going to inflict that on the general public just
yet.
See doc/release-notes.txt for detailed release notes covering the changes
since the beta release of version 15b on 6 June 91. The rest of this message
is derived from, the cmucl(1) man page and the README file.
Robert A. MacLachlan (···@cs.cmu.edu)
________________________________________________________________________
Sun Release 4.1 1
CMUCL(1) USER COMMANDS CMUCL(1)
NAME
CMU Common Lisp
DESCRIPTION
CMU Common Lisp is public domain "industrial strength" Com-
mon Lisp programming environment. Many of the X3j13 changes
have been incorporated into CMU CL. Wherever possible, this
has been done so as to transparently allow use of either
CLtL1 or proposed ANSI CL. Probably the new features most
interesting to users are SETF functions, LOOP and the WITH-
COMPILATION-UNIT macro.
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
CMU CL is currently available for Sparcstations and DECsta-
tions (pmaxes) running Mach (or OSF/1). We are beta-testing
a SunOS SPARC version and an IBM RT Mach version. At least
16 megabytes of memory and 25 megabytes of disk space are
recommended. As usual, more is better.
SUPPORT
Bug reports should be sent to ··········@cs.cmu.edu. Please
consult your local CMU CL maintainer or Common Lisp expert
to verify that the problem really is a bug before sending to
this list.
We have insufficient staffing to provide extensive support
to people outside of CMU. We are looking for university and
industrial affiliates to help us with porting and mainte-
nance for hardware and software that is not widely used at
CMU.
OVERVIEW
When compared other Common Lisp implementations (such as
Allegro), CMU CL has two broad advantages:
-- The new CMU CL compiler (Python) is more sophisticated
than other Common Lisp compilers. It both produces
better code and is easier to use.
-- The programming environment based on the Hemlock editor
is better integrated than gnu-emacs based environments.
(Though you can still use GNU if you want.)
CMU CL also has significant non-technical advantages:
-- It has good local support for CMU users, and is well
integrated with the CMU CS environment.
-- It is public domain, and is freely available to non-CMU
sites that aren't able to afford a site-license for a
commercial Lisp.
COMPILER FEATURES
The `Advanced Compiler' chapter of the User's manual exten-
sively discusses Python's optimization capabilities (See
DOCUMENTATION below.) Here are a few high points:
-- Good efficiency and type-checking at the same time. Com-
piling code safe gives a 2x speed reduction at worst.
-- In safe code, type declarations are verified, allowing
declarations to be debugged in safe code. When you go to
compile unsafe, you know the declarations are right.
-- Full source level debugging of compiled code, including
display of the exact call that got an error.
-- Good efficiency notes that tell you why an operation
can't be open coded or where you are number-consing, and
that provide unprecedented source context
-- Block compilation, partial evaluation, lightweight func-
tions and proper tail-recursion allow low-cost use of
function call abstraction.
___________________________________________________________________________
This software is "as is", and has no warranty of any kind. CMU and the
authors assume no responsibility for the consequences of any use of this
software.
This is a general beta release, meaning that anyone can FTP it, but we won't be
very sympathetic about catastrophes resulting from your dependence on CMU CL.
This release mostly fixes bugs in the previous release, and if all goes well,
we will announce a later default release of this system
See "man cmucl" (man/man1/cmucl.1) for other general information.
Distribution:
CMU Common Lisp is only available via anonymous FTP. We don't have the
manpower to make tapes. All of our files are in the AFS file system. Here are
some suggested gateway machines:
lisp-rt1.slisp.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.217.9)
lisp-rt2.slisp.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.217.10)
Log in with the user "anonymous" and ·········@host" as password (i.e. your
EMAIL address.) Due to the way anonymous FTP access control is done, it is
important to "cd" to the source directory with a single command, and then do a
"get" operation. If you have any trouble with FTP access, please send mail to
·····@cs.cmu.edu.
The binary release area is /afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/clisp/release. This
directory holds compressed tar files with names of the form:
<version>-<machine>_<os>.tar.Z
FTP compressed tar archives in binary mode. To extract, "cd" to the
directory that is to be the root of the tree, then type:
uncompress <file.tar.Z | tar xf - .
The latest SunOS Sparc release is:
-rw-r--r-- 1 ram 9248115 Feb 2 17:13 15d-sun4c_41.tar.Z
The resulting tree is 23 megabytes. For installation directions, see the
section "site initialization" in README file at the root of the tree.
If poor network connections make it difficult to transfer a 10 meg file, the
release is also available split into five parts, with the suffix ".0" to ".4".
To extract from multiple files, use:
cat file.tar.Z.* | uncompress | tar xf - .
The release area also contains source distributions and other binary
distributions. A listing of the current contents of the release area is in
release/FILES. Major release announcements will be made to comp.lang.lisp
until there is enough volume to warrant a comp.lang.lisp.cmu.
Major release announcements will be made to comp.lang.lisp until there is
enough volume to warrant a comp.lang.lisp.cmu.
SPARC Notes:
We still have not done much SPARC-specific tuning. Performance will improve
from 10-30% when we add instruction scheduling and register windows.
Source availability:
Lisp and documentation sources are available via anonymous FTP ftp to any CMU
CS machine. [See the "Distribution" section for FTP instructions and source
distribution information.] All CMU written code is public domain, but CMU CL
also makes use of several imported packages: PCL, CLX and XP. Although these
packages are copyrighted, they may be freely distributed without any licensing
agreement or fee.
Also in /afs/cs/project/clisp/release:
-rw-r--r-- 1 ram 3626581 Feb 2 16:59 15d-source.tar.Z
Image of all ".lisp" source files used to build version 15d.