We are pleased to announce the release of Guile 1.7.1.  This is a
'technology preview' for the upcoming Guile 1.8.  It can be found
here:

    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.7.1.tar.gz

Its MD5 checksum is

    21c9f4061166900d2926955ade0ef5cc  guile-1.7.1.tar.gz

This version is guaranteed to contain serious bugs, and the publically
visible interfaces will almost certainly change before 1.8 is
released.  The 1.7 releases might be termed "selected snapshots".

We are releasing it anyway to start testing the new features, and to
get feedback about how difficult or tedious it is to switch from Guile
1.6 to this series.

Ideally, you should be able to just link your program with Guile 1.7.1
instead of with Guile 1.6.x.  You will get many warnings about
deprecated features, but your program should nevertheless run
correctly.  If you find that this is not the case (which is quite
likely) please do not change your program yet.  Instead, report the
problem to <bug-guile@gnu.org>.

The shared library major versions have been bumped compared to the 1.6
series, but they will not be bumped on binary incompatible changes
within the 1.7 series.


The NEWS file is quite long.  Here are the most spectacular entries in
a condensed form:

  Changes since the 1.6.x series:

  - Guile is now licensed with the GNU Lesser General Public License.

  - The manual is now licensed with the GNU Free Documentation License.

  - We now use GNU MP for bignums.

  - We now use native POSIX threads for real concurrent threads.

  - There is now support for copy-on-write substrings and
    mutation-sharing substrings.

  - We now have exact rationals, such as 1/3.

  - A new family of functions for converting between C values and
    Scheme values has been added that is future-proof and thread-safe.

  - The INUM macros like SCM_MAKINUM have been deprecated.

  - The macros SCM_STRINGP, SCM_STRING_CHARS, SCM_STRING_LENGTH,
    SCM_SYMBOL_CHARS, and SCM_SYMBOL_LENGTH have been deprecated.

  - There is a new way to deal with non-local exits and re-entries in
    C code, which is nicer than scm_internal_dynamic_wind.

  - There are new malloc-like functions that work better than
    scm_must_malloc, etc.

and most importantly

  - call-with-current-continuation is now also available under the name
    call/cc.

See NEWS and the manual for more details.