Hello Dennis,
On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 20:02 -0400, Dennis Ogbe wrote:
Hello,
I am working on embedding ECL in a reasonably-sized C++ program and I have been using v16.1.3 until now, since it seems like this is the latest official release.
Yes, 16.1.3 is the latest official release.
However, it seems like there is a lot of activity and bug fixes in the develop branch and I already ran into a few bugs (for example [1]) that are fixed in develop, but are not in any release. The documentation also seems to overlap more with the develop branch than the latest release.
That is also true, we work on the next release and we expect to make the new one soon™ (only a few tasks has been left over to implement).
In your opinion, what is the best and most stable ECL version to use as of June 2019? I have some reservations about simply picking a random commit from a dev branch, so I wanted to reach out and ask y'all directly.
There is no good answer for that. While develop branch indeed has many improvements in form of bug fixes and new (dare I say – exciting) features it is only loosely tested. Before each release we work hard to test the release candidate against a big variety of operating systems, architectures and libraries (cl-test-grid is an invaluable help with that) and try to fix regressions. If you feel adventurous just pick develop branch, we do not commit there half-baked things (only stuff which we are certain about or which was a subject of a peer review / testing around the thing being changed) - it is fairly stable. But there is no guarantee that you won't hit some ugly regression we are not aware of yet. Otherwise you may try to live with 16.1.3 until we release the new 16.2.0 version – hopefully withing a few months from now.
Thanks for all the hard work, this project is great!
That's very kind of you to say that. If it is not a secret what are you working on?
[1] https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl/issues/418
Best regards, Daniel