Re: [ANN] CHICKEN 5.3.0 has been released

[Mario Domenech Goulart]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2021 08:28:44 +0100 Peter Bex <peter@more-magic.net> wrote:

> Dear CHICKEN users,
>
> We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CHICKEN 5.3.0
> at the following URL:
> https://code.call-cc.org/releases/5.3.0/chicken-5.3.0.tar.gz
>
> This tarball has the following SHA256 checksum:
> c3ad99d8f9e17ed810912ef981ac3b0c2e2f46fb0ecc033b5c3b6dca1bdb0d76
>
> This is a bugfix release which fixes several important issues, and
> it is highly recommended to update to this version.
>
> Irregex has been updated to the latest upstream (0.9.10), which fixes
> a few issues with bol handling and irregex-replace/all with positive
> lookbehind replaces all matches rather than just the first.
>
> A few bugs in the module system's handling of reexport have been fixed,
> as well as a few bugs in the optimization of using argvector directly
> in rest arguments, and a nasty issue where mutated parameters would be
> reset if the mutation happened in a signal handler.
>
> A nice improvement is that to build CHICKEN, on most platforms you no
> longer need to provide the PLATFORM variable to Make; we auto-detect
> the platform you're building on.  Of course, for cross-compilation
> you'll still have to set it.
>
> We tweaked the garbage collector to avoid thrashing when the heap was
> almost full.  This should drastically improve performance for certain
> usage patterns that trigger this pathological behaviour.
>
> Finally, we fixed a few issues on Windows.  There were some misbehaviours
> when using a different shell when building core versus during usage and
> the test suite now should pass again under Windows.
>
> Thanks to everyone who helped to test this release.
>
> For a full list of the changes since 5.2.0, see the NEWS file:
> https://code.call-cc.org/releases/5.3.0/NEWS

Thanks, Peter.

I'd like to also mention two other improvements that combined lead to
mind blowing results: TCC support and the fixes for parallel make.

With those two combined, it's possible to build CHICKEN from scratch in
less than one second on a relatively modern CPU.

Here's an example on my box (Intel i5-8259U):

$ time make PREFIX=$HOME/local/chicken-5.3.0-tcc C_COMPILER=tcc -j8
...
real    0m0.741s
user    0m3.782s
sys     0m0.615s

All the best.
Mario
-- 
http://parenteses.org/mario