| 1 | We are pleased to announce the release of Guile 1.7.1. This is a |
| 2 | 'technology preview' for the upcoming Guile 1.8. It can be found |
| 3 | here: |
| 4 | |
| 5 | ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.7.1.tar.gz |
| 6 | |
| 7 | Its MD5 checksum is |
| 8 | |
| 9 | 21c9f4061166900d2926955ade0ef5cc guile-1.7.1.tar.gz |
| 10 | |
| 11 | This version is guaranteed to contain serious bugs, and the publically |
| 12 | visible interfaces will almost certainly change before 1.8 is |
| 13 | released. The 1.7 releases might be termed "selected snapshots". |
| 14 | |
| 15 | We are releasing it anyway to start testing the new features, and to |
| 16 | get feedback about how difficult or tedious it is to switch from Guile |
| 17 | 1.6 to this series. |
| 18 | |
| 19 | Ideally, you should be able to just link your program with Guile 1.7.1 |
| 20 | instead of with Guile 1.6.x. You will get many warnings about |
| 21 | deprecated features, but your program should nevertheless run |
| 22 | correctly. If you find that this is not the case (which is quite |
| 23 | likely) please do not change your program yet. Instead, report the |
| 24 | problem to <bug-guile@gnu.org>. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | The shared library major versions have been bumped compared to the 1.6 |
| 27 | series, but they will not be bumped on binary incompatible changes |
| 28 | within the 1.7 series. |
| 29 | |
| 30 | |
| 31 | The NEWS file is quite long. Here are the most spectacular entries in |
| 32 | a condensed form: |
| 33 | |
| 34 | Changes since the 1.6.x series: |
| 35 | |
| 36 | - Guile is now licensed with the GNU Lesser General Public License. |
| 37 | |
| 38 | - The manual is now licensed with the GNU Free Documentation License. |
| 39 | |
| 40 | - We now use GNU MP for bignums. |
| 41 | |
| 42 | - We now use native POSIX threads for real concurrent threads. |
| 43 | |
| 44 | - There is now support for copy-on-write substrings and |
| 45 | mutation-sharing substrings. |
| 46 | |
| 47 | - We now have exact rationals, such as 1/3. |
| 48 | |
| 49 | - A new family of functions for converting between C values and |
| 50 | Scheme values has been added that is future-proof and thread-safe. |
| 51 | |
| 52 | - The INUM macros like SCM_MAKINUM have been deprecated. |
| 53 | |
| 54 | - The macros SCM_STRINGP, SCM_STRING_CHARS, SCM_STRING_LENGTH, |
| 55 | SCM_SYMBOL_CHARS, and SCM_SYMBOL_LENGTH have been deprecated. |
| 56 | |
| 57 | - There is a new way to deal with non-local exits and re-entries in |
| 58 | C code, which is nicer than scm_internal_dynamic_wind. |
| 59 | |
| 60 | - There are new malloc-like functions that work better than |
| 61 | scm_must_malloc, etc. |
| 62 | |
| 63 | and most importantly |
| 64 | |
| 65 | - call-with-current-continuation is now also available under the name |
| 66 | call/cc. |
| 67 | |
| 68 | See NEWS and the manual for more details. |