[Larceny-users] Larceny v0.97b1 now available for beta testing

[William D Clinger]

Larceny and Petit Larceny v0.97b1 are now available
for beta testing.  See http://larceny.ccs.neu.edu/
for downloads.

Some of the more important differences between the
v0.97b1 beta release and the planned v0.97 release
are:

    Common Larceny is not part of the beta release.

    This beta release still does not recognize the
    .larceny.sls file suffix.

    Larceny's R6RS mode still limits R6RS top-level
    programs and libraries to Latin-1.  In R5RS and
    ERR5RS modes, however, load-from-port can still
    be used to load R5RS and ERR5RS programs and
    libraries from UTF-8 or UTF-16 files.

Differences between v0.97b1 and v0.963 include:

    Command-line options for selecting Latin-1 or
    UTF-8 transcoding for (current-input-port) and
    (current-output-port).

    Corrected string-titlecase to break words as
    specified by Unicode Annex 29.

    R6RS semantics for arithmetic.

    Expanded the bignum range from 2^21 bits (a
    little over half a million decimal digits) to
    2^29 bits (a little over 160 million decimal
    digits).

    Some bignum operations are faster (less slow).

    Added r5rs:load and r5rs:require for loading
    or requiring R5RS programs and libraries from
    ERR5RS or R6RS code.

    Faster (less slow) compilation of some large
    libraries and programs.  (A complete build of
    Larceny from source now takes about 5 minutes
    on most of our development machines, which is
    down from 8 minutes a year ago.  Subsequent
    rebuilds still take about 15 seconds.)

    compile-stale-libraries is a little faster
    (less slow) and more reliable (less unreliable).

    Improved (less poor) profiling.

    Improved implementations of SRFI 1, SRFI 13,
    SRFI 69.

    The guard syntax now calls raise-continuable
    instead of raise when all clauses' tests are
    false.

    R6RS file options are now fully implemented
    (except on Windows, where no-truncate still
    doesn't work).

    Implemented a closer approximation to our
    best guess as to the R6RS semantics intended
    for set-port-position!.

Larceny v0.97b1 still fails 2 of 8907 tests in
revision 11372 of PLT Scheme's R6RS test program.
One of the failed tests is caused by Larceny's
non-enforcement of the letrec* restriction; the
other involves an arcane interaction between meta
levels, rename-on-import, and free-identifier=?.

We believe Larceny implements the most important
99.98% of the R6RS, but we will continue to make
improvements.  Thank you for your patience and
support.

William D Clinger
Felix S. Klock II