Guile 1.7.2 has been released

[Marius Vollmer]

We are pleased to announce the release of Guile 1.7.2.  This is a
'technology preview' for the upcoming Guile 1.8.  It can be found
here:

    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.7.2.tar.gz

Its MD5 checksum is

    7fabb64198993e971f65a27846202388  guile-1.7.2.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".

Specifically, libguile has not yet been reviewed for thread-safeness.

We are releasing it anyway to start testing the new features, and to
get feedback about how well Guile actually behaves in a multi-threaded
setting.

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 interesting entries:

  Changes since 1.7.1:

  * 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 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.

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