guile/ANNOUNCE

We are pleased to announce the release of Guile 1.7.91.  This is a
release candidate for Guile 1.8.  It can be found here:

    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.7.91.tar.gz

Its MD5 checksum is

    b2106c1b574e22ec67c4c2178074b5ec  guile-1.7.91.tar.gz

The plan is to release version 1.8.0 next weekend, 2006-01-19, if all
goes well.


The NEWS file is quite long.  Here are the most interesting entries:

  Changes since 1.6:

  * 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 have exact rationals, such as 1/3.

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

  * There is a new way to initalize Guile that allows one to use Guile
    from threads that have not been created by Guile.

  * Mutexes and condition variables are now always fair.  A recursive
    mutex must be requested explicitely.

  * The low-level thread API has been removed.

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

  * 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.

  * There is a new way to access all kinds of vectors and arrays from
    C that is efficient and thread-safe.

  * The concept of dynamic roots has been factored into continuation
    barriers and dynamic states.

See NEWS and the manual for more details.