ABCL 1.8.0
Under the gathering storms of the Fall 2020, we are pleased to
release ABCL 1.8.0 as the Ninth major revision of the
implementation.
This Ninth Edition of the implementation now supports building and
running on the recently released openjdk15 platform. This release
is intended as the last major release to support the openjdk6,
openjdk7, and openjdk8 platforms, for with abcl-2.0.0 we intend to
move the minimum platform to openjdk11 or better in order to
efficiently [implement atomic memory compare and swap
operations][github/issues/92].
With this release, the implementation of the EXT:JAR-PATHNAME and
EXT:URL-PATHNAME subtypes of cl:PATHNAME has been fixed to the
point that arbitrary references to ZIP archives within archives
now work for read-only stream operations (CL:PROBE-FILE,
CL:TRUENAME, CL:OPEN, CL:LOAD, CL:FILE-WRITE-DATE, CL:DIRECTORY,
and CL:MERGE-PATHNAMES). The previous versions of the
implementation relied on the ability for java.net.URL to open
streams of an archive within an archive, behavior that was
silently dropped after Java 5, and consequently hasn't worked on
common platforms supported by the Bear in a long time. The
overhaul of the implementation restores the feasibility of
accessing fasls from within jar files. Interested parties may
examine the ASDF-JAR contrib for a recipe for packaging and
accessing such artifacts. Please consult the ["Beyond ANSI:
Pathnames" Section 4.2 of the User Manual][manual] for further
details for how namestrings and components of PATHNAME objects
have been revised.
A more comprehensive list of [CHANGES][] is available with the source.
[1.8.0]: https://abcl.org/releases/1.8.0/
[asdf-jar]: https://abcl.org/svn/trunk/abcl/contrib/asdf-jar/README.markdown
[github/issues/92]: https://github.com/armedbear/abcl/issues/92
[manual]: https://abcl.org/releases/1.8.0/abcl-1.8.0.pdf
[CHANGES]: https://abcl.org/svn/tags/1.8.0/CHANGES
--
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is nothing
to compare to it now."