We are please to announce that we have released the Sixth Edition of the Armed Bear Common Lisp implementation as ABCL 1.5.0.
Due to the lack of a publicly available Java 5 implementation, with this release we drop support for that platform, and henceforth support running on Java 6, Java 7, and Java 8.
In addition to consolidating eight months of bug fixes, the following notable features are now also present in the implementation.
The compiler now records more complete debugging information on the SYS:SOURCE symbol property.
ABCL-INTROSPECT offers improved inspection of backtraces to the point that local variables may be inspected in Lisp debug frames. Patches to SLIME to use this feature are in the process of being merged into the upstream repository. The OBJECTWEB system allows the user to disassemble JVM bytecode via dependencies managed by Maven.
JSS now contains a syntax for accessing Java static and member fields.
For declaring dependencies on Java artifacts ABCL-ASDF, we have added an experimental syntax to address JRE/JDK artifacts via the ASDF:JDK-JAR class, as well as the ability to more finely control Maven dependencies with the ASDF:MVN-MODULE class.
A complete list of [changes][] may be viewed in the source repository.
[changes]: http://abcl.org/svn/tags/1.5.0/CHANGES
Binaries for this release may either be downloaded directly from http://abcl.org/releases/1.5.0, retrieved from the distributed Maven POM graph, or run from Docker via
docker run -it easye/abcl:1.5.0
Many thanks to all who have contributed to nurturing the Bear's execution of conforming ANSI Common Lisp on the Java Virtual Machine.