Upcoming binary release

[Brian T Rice]

Lee and I have been putting together a Slate binary using Embedded CL
(http://ecls.sf.net) and the new inlining compiler written in CL. We've
had to bend over backwards to get the system to work there, because it's
missing some features, but this should be worked out really soon. If you
want to test it, download ECL 0.9 and load "ecl.lisp" from the CVS
repository, and then execute the output binary. One BUG is that the CL
functions READ-SEQUENCE and WRITE-SEQUENCE are not provided by default in
ECL apparently; we are looking at a work-around for that already.

Anyway, the new compiler should become the default after a little while.
We initially produced it to speed up the bootstrap build testing, but it
has the pleasant side-effect of being a lot nicer for real use. However,
compilation itself is fairly slow, especially within ECL which uses GCC:
its primary purpose is to be highly integrated with C. So, I can move
forward on library linking and other things to develop out the sockets and
graphics libraries.

Some documentation is in order:

A new flag has been included in the compiler with an interface as a lobby
attribute: "compileMode: aBoolean"  will set/reset the fileIn mode to
compile the whole file before executing or just invoke the normal
interpreter. The latter is the default, for comfortable experimentation.
There is also a compile-slate-to-lisp batch function, which we will use to
generate binaries for the important standard libraries, so that the "out
of the box" experience will be as powerful as possible. Hopefully we will
be able to use this portably to have pre-compiled libraries for, say,
CMUCL, which is faster than ECL, for the dedicated bootstrap effort.

This is all of course in preparation for the Smalltalk conference next
week. I'm considering stamping this binary release (with all the
libraries and their sources, of course) as "0.1".

I also need to make sure that the unit-testing and other administrative
features are working in the next few days.

Any comments or ideas?

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/