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Update NEWS.

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* NEWS: Update.
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Andy Wingo 2016-02-01 15:32:03 +01:00
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NEWS
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@ -8,9 +8,79 @@ Please send Guile bug reports to bug-guile@gnu.org.
Changes in 2.1.2 (changes since the 2.1.1 alpha release):
* Notable changes
** Unboxed arithmetic
It used to be that Guile's numbers were always boxed with a tag
indicating their type. Small integers could sometimes represent their
tag and value in one word; these are the fixnums. Other kinds of
numbers would be allocated on the heap.
Guile can now unbox arithmetic on exact integers (values in the signed
and unsigned 64-bit integer range) and inexact reals (floating-point
numbers). Access to bytevectors are always unboxed, and some arithmetic
can be unboxed as well. Unboxing eliminates run-time allocation for
numbers and removes run-time polymorphic dispatch, providing a
significant speedup.
** Faster build times
Building Guile from a tarball can now take advantage of a "prebuilt/"
tree of prebuilt .go files. These compiled files are created when a
tarball is made, and are used to speed up the build for users of
official releases.
These pre-built binaries are not necessary, however: they are not stored
in revision control and can always be re-created from the source, given
that Guile can bootstrap itself from its minimal bootstrap C
interpreter. If you do not want to depend on these pre-built binaries,
you can "make -C prebuilt clean" before building.
If Guile doesn't pre-build binaries for your architecture and you would
like support for your architecture, see prebuilt/Makefile.am for more
information on how to add support.
** Better backtraces
Guile's backtraces do a better job at finding the function name, and
they also do a better job printing function arguments whose values are
unavailable.
** Add "tree" display mode for statprof.
See the newly updated "Statprof" section of the manual, for more.
** Many small compiler and VM improvements
The user-visible change is that Guile is faster, for many small reasons.
See the commit log for detailed changes.
Note that until the stable 2.2.0 release is made, we will not make any
efforts towards binary compatibility among 2.1.x releases. Compiled
Scheme files from older pre-releases in the Guile 2.1.x series are not
loadable by the Guile 2.1.2 pre-release.
** Better handling of GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH
It used to be that Guile would stop at the first .go file it found in
the GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH. If that file turned out to be out of
date, then no .go file would be loaded. Now Guile will continue to
search the path for a file which is both present and up-to-date, with
respect to the .scm file.
** Fix build when threads are disabled
** Fix cross-compilation of .go files
* New deprecations
** `with-statprof' macro deprecated
Use the `statprof' procedure instead.
* Incompatible changes
** Remove frame-procedure
** Remove `frame-procedure'
Several optimizations in Guile make `frame-procedure' an interface that
we can no longer support. For background, `frame-procedure' used to
@ -24,10 +94,27 @@ are all known) are optimized in such a way that slot 0 is not a
procedure but some optimized representation of the procedure's free
variables. Instead, developers building debugging tools that would like
access to `frame-procedure' are invited to look at the source for the
`(system vm frame)' for alternate interfaces.
`(system vm frame)' module for alternate interfaces, including the new
`frame-procedure-name'.
** Remove `,procedure' REPL command
Not all procedures have values, so it doesn't make sense to expose this
interface to the user. Instead, the `,locals' REPL command will include
the callee, if it is live.
** Remove `frame-local-ref', `frame-local-set!', `frame-num-locals'
These procedures reference values in a frame on the stack. Since we now
have unboxed values of different kinds, it is now necessary to specify
the type when reference locals, and once this incompatible change needs
to be made, we might as well make these interfaces private. See
"Frames' in the manual, for more information on the replacements for
these low-level interfaces.
Changes in 2.1.x (changes since the 2.0.x series):
Previous changes in 2.1.x (changes since the 2.0.x series):
* Notable changes