~ chicken-core (master) /NEWS


   16.0.0
   2
   3- Core libraries
   4  - All modules specified by the R7RS small language are now available in
   5    the core system.
   6  - The internal string representation has been converted to UTF-8,
   7    making strings fully UNICODE capable.
   8  - The (chicken blob) module has been replaced with (chicken bytevector),
   9    containing R7RS compatible bytevector operations. Bytevectors are
  10    now fully equivalent to SRFI-4 u8vectors.
  11  - The read-syntax for blobs (`#${...}') has been removed. Bytevectors
  12    can be read using `#u8(...)' or `#u8"..."'.
  13  - `open-input-file' and `open-output-file' accept a file encoding,
  14    supported are currently UTF-8 (the default) and Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).
  15  - `file-read', `file-write', 'set-pseudo-random-seed!' and `random-bytes'
  16    require a bytevector argument and do not accept strings.
  17  - `process-fork', `process-run', `process' and `process*' return now
  18    a process-object instead of a PID, use process record accessors to
  19    retrieve exit-status and input/output ports. `process-wait' and
  20    `process-signal' accept either a PID or a process object as
  21    argument.
  22  - File-locking operations in the (chicken file posix) module now use the
  23    flock(2) system call, operator over whole files, are thread-safe and
  24    use a simpler interface. `file-test-lock' has been removed.
  25  - `read-u8vector', `read-u8vector!' and `write-u8vector' have been
  26    removed, use the equivalent operations from the (chicken io)
  27    module instead.
  28  - Added `read-bytevector', `read-bytevector!' and `write-bytevector'
  29    to the (chicken io) module.
  30  - Removed `set-port-name!', use the SRFI-17 setter for `port-name'
  31    instead.
  32  - Added `port-encoding' to the (chicken port) module.
  33  - `make-input-port' and `make-output-port' take their optional
  34    port methods as keyword arguments now.
  35  - Added `make-binary-input-port' and `make-binary-output-port'.
  36  - Locatives on strings are now indexed by code-point, not byte.
  37  - `symbol-escape' now also controls whether symbols are printed in
  38    escaped ("|...|") mode or not.
  39  - Symbol printing is stricter in deciding when symbols should be escaped
  40    or not.
  41  - The following primitives have been moved from (chicken base)
  42    to R7RS modules:
  43    - `exact-integer?`, `exact-integer-sqrt?', `vector-copy!',
  44      `make-parameter', `call/cc', `open-input-string',
  45      `open-output-string', `get-output-string', `input-port-open?',
  46      `output-port-open?', `parameterize' and `port?' moved from the
  47      (chicken base) to the (scheme base) module.
  48    - `case-lambda' moved from (chicken base) to (scheme case-lambda).
  49    - `features' moved from (chicken platform) to (scheme base).
  50    - `write-string' moved from (chicken io) to (scheme base) and its
  51      signature changed to the R7RS one.
  52    - `define-record-type' moved to (scheme base) and is generative,
  53      to be compliant with R7RS.
  54  - `syntax-error' has been removed from (chicken syntax) and is now a
  55    macro and part of (scheme base).
  56  - `record-instance?' and `make-record-instance' accept non-symbolic
  57    type specifiers to support generative record types.
  58  - The new (chicken number-vector) module now provides a superset of
  59    SRFI-4, including 64 and 128-bit complex number vectors, the `srfi-4'
  60    module is still available but exports only those procedures as are
  61    specified in SRFI-4.
  62  - The second (optional) parameter for `load' and `load-relative' may be
  63    either an environment or an evaluation procedure.
  64  - The module aliases `srfi-0', `srfi-6', `srfi-9', `srfi-11', `srfi-23',
  65    `srfi-39' and `srfi-98' have been removed (all of these are covered by
  66    R7RS).
  67  - The modules `r4rs', `r5rs', `r4rs-null' and `r5rs-null' have been
  68    renamed to `(scheme XXX)'.
  69  - Hexadecimal escape sequences in strings and extended symbols must be
  70    terminated by the `;' character, following R7RS.
  71  - The `#ci'/`#cs' read syntaxes have been removed, use
  72    `#![no-]fold-case'
  73    markers instead.
  74  - `include' and `include-relative' accept multiple filenames,
  75    `include-ci'
  76    has been added.
  77  - Added `include-path' to (chicken platform) module.
  78  - Added `number-vector-data' to (chicken memory representation) module.
  79  - `define-library' has been extended to support the `export-all'
  80    specification.
  81  - The platform-identifier "mingw32" has been renamed to "mingw".
  82  - Library procedures that return paths now always convert them to
  83    contain forward slashes, 'make-pathname' always uses "/" for path
  84    separation.
  85  - Added `expand1' to (chicken syntax) module for expanding a macro
  86    only once, also added the ",x1" command to "csi" for this.
  87  - Added the (chicken version) module.
  88  - "delete-file*" and "delete-file" now behave consistently with
  89    broken symlinks.
  90  - number->string now accepts bases up to 36, where before it only accepted
  91    bases up to 16 (thanks to Diego A. Mundo)
  92  - string->number now handles ambiguous cases involving the character "i"
  93    in bases higher than 18 more consistently.
  94
  95- Syntax expander:
  96  - `syntax-rules' attempts to better support tail patterns with ellipses
  97     (#1736).
  98
  99- FFI changes:
 100  - Strings and symbols passed to foreign code are not copied, they are
 101    passed directly, any mutations done by external code will be visible on the
 102    Scheme side.
 103  - Complex numbers, C structs and unions can now be passed directly as
 104    arguments and returned as results when interfacing to C code.
 105
 106- Tools
 107  - The compiler and interpreter option `-r5rs-syntax' has been renamed to
 108    `-r7rs-syntax' and does not disable extended symbol syntax ("|...|")
 109    anymore.
 110  - The "feathers" debugger has been removed from the core and is now
 111    available as an egg.
 112  - The `set-describer!' procedure has been removed from the `csi' module.
 113  - The "csc" program now accepts tool flags (e.g. -compiler, -cc etc)
 114    which have paths with spaces in them without requiring the user to
 115    double-quote them.  As a consequence, it no longer accepts programs
 116    with space separated flags for tool arguments (e.g.
 117    "csc -cc 'gcc -debug'" etc).  If this is desired, write a short
 118    shell script which calls the tool with your flags.
 119  - `chicken-install' now locks the cache directory during
 120    egg-installation.
 121  - Added component type `installed-c-object' to egg format.
 122  - The `csc-options' and `link-options' configuration clauses in egg
 123    specifications now allow `custom-config' forms to produce arbitrary
 124    computed compiler and linker options.
 125  - Added scripts/smoke-test.sh to automate basic testing of chicken-core
 126
 127- Build system
 128  - A "configure" script is now used to prepare the sources for building
 129    everything. This simplifies the use of "make", allows more elaborate
 130    platform sanity checks and follows conventions.
 131  - On Windows the minimal "mingw" build is not supported anymore, a POSIX
 132    shell and the basic sete of command-line utilities is now required
 133    (formerly the "mingw-msys" build). Chris Wellons "w64devkit" is now
 134    the recommended toolchain. The platform identifier "mingw-msys" has
 135    been renamed to "mingw".
 136  - The system can now be built with "zig cc" as a C compiler/linker
 137    replacement.
 138
 1395.4.0
 140
 141- Security fixes
 142  - CVE-2022-45145: Neutralize possible escape characters in egg metadata
 143    to avoid arbitrary OS command injection during egg installation,
 144    reported by Vasilij Schneidermann who also provided the necessary
 145    patches to mitigate this problem.
 146  - The runtime option "-:b" has been removed, as it was deemed too
 147    insecure to be able to drop to a REPL from the CLI of any program.
 148  - Runtime option processing has been hardened: processing now stops on
 149    the first non-runtime option or after "-:", whichever comes first.
 150
 151- Core libraries
 152  - Fix type declarations for `file-select` (reported by Anton Idukov).
 153  - Change `create-temporary-{file,directory}` fallback code on Windows to
 154    use %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/Temp if that environment variable is set.
 155  - Added new thread-safe API for POSIX signals ("make-signal-handler",
 156    "signal-ignore" and "signal-default") and deprecated the existing one.
 157  - Added "make-finalizer" to execute finalizers in a thread-safe
 158    manner.
 159  - Added weak pairs to (chicken base), with similar behaviour to Chez Scheme.
 160  - Added "locative-index", kindly contributed by John Croisant.
 161  - Added "fp*+" (fused multiply-add) to "chicken.flonum" module
 162    (suggested by Christian Himpe).
 163  - Added flonum-specific hyperbolic functions and their inverse to
 164    "chicken.flonum" module (suggested by Christian Himpe).
 165  - The `process-execute` procedure now sets argv[0] to the unmodified
 166    filename. Previously, the directory part would be stripped.
 167  - Added support for embedded strings and characters in SRFI-4 vector
 168    literals.
 169  - read-with-source-info is now documented and officially supported,
 170    from the (chicken syntax) module.  read/source-info is still exported
 171    from the undocumented internal (chicken compiler support) module, but
 172    using it from there is deprecated.
 173  - Added "export/rename" to (chicken module) for renaming identifiers on
 174    export.
 175  - The values of the TMPDIR, TMP and TEMP environment variables are no
 176    longer memoized (fixes #1830).
 177  - Condition objects produced by procedures that change errno now have
 178    an `errno' property.
 179  - Deprecated "chicken-home" and added "include-path" in the
 180    chicken.platform module.
 181  - Irregex has been updated to upstream 0.9.11 plus an additional fix
 182    for sre->string.  The 0.9.11 release fixes a few problems related to
 183    utf-8 handling (which should not affect CHICKEN) and expands the
 184    definition for the 'whitespace character set to include vertical tab,
 185    carriage return and form feed.
 186
 187- Tools
 188  - Fix scripts generated by `chicken-install` on Windows to not quote `>>`
 189    when echoing into files which would result in empty egg-info files
 190    (reported and fixed by Jani Hakala).
 191  - The -R option for csi and csc now accepts list-notation like
 192    e.g. (srfi 1).  Fixes #1809, reported by Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe.
 193  - Fix shell quotation in options passed from csc to other tools.
 194    Fixes #1302, reported by Xin Wang.
 195  - The -prelude and -postlude options for csc work properly again.
 196  - chicken-install now retrieves the latest egg version when
 197    instructed to install an egg that's already installed (#1802).
 198  - When `location' is specified in setup.defaults, chicken-install
 199    will consider two location layouts when looking for eggs:
 200    <location>/<egg> and <location>/<egg>/<version>.
 201  - chicken-install: Fix #1684 (programs that specify
 202    component-dependencies should build-depend on their import
 203    libraries).
 204  - chicken-install now caches eggs installed from local locations.
 205  - chicken-install now accepts the -location command line option
 206    (short: -l) to specify local directories where to get egg sources
 207    from.
 208  - chicken-install now gives a warning on unexpected properties (#1492).
 209  - chicken-install now uses a directory specific for cache metadata
 210    (VERSION, STATUS and TIMESTAMP files) to avoid collisions with source
 211    files on case-insensitive file systems like on MacOS (#1753, reported
 212    by Kon Lovett).
 213
 214- Syntax expander
 215  - When passing a module as an environment to eval, correctly resolve
 216    identifiers in macro expansions (#1295 reported by Caolan McMahon).
 217  - Internal definitions honor rebindings of core special forms (#1132).
 218  - Globally defining an identifier previously bound to a macro now fully
 219    shadows the macro (#1166, reported by Michele La Monaca).
 220
 221- Compiler
 222  - When emitting types files, the output list is now sorted, to ensure
 223    deterministic build output (fixes #1783, reported by "ss2").
 224
 225- Build system
 226  - Fix compiler warnings about zero-sized `memset` (reported by Claude Marinier).
 227  - Disable broken test-create-temporary-file on Windows (reported by "jjhoo").
 228  - Drop use of XCODE_... environment variables on MacOS.
 229  - Add build directory to rpath on MacOS so that the test suite picks up correct
 230    libchicken, even if CHICKEN is already installed (thanks to Christian Himpe).
 231  - Default "cc" on BSD systems for building CHICKEN to avoid ABI problems
 232    when linking with C++ code.
 233
 234- Runtime system
 235  - Make line numbers available for error output and during syntax expansion
 236    in the interpreter as well as the compiler.
 237
 2385.3.0
 239
 240- Core libraries
 241  - In (chicken process-context posix), the setters for current-user-id,
 242    current-effective-user-id and current-group-id now check that the
 243    new user/group value is a fixnum instead of blindly passing it on
 244    to the C implementation (which would cause bogus user ids to be set).
 245    Fixes #1787, thanks to Christopher Brannon.
 246  - The srfi-17 module now exports the `getter-with-setter` and `setter`
 247    procedures, not just the set! macro (thanks to Lassi Kortela)
 248  - Fix hang in chicken-install -update-db on Windows (thanks to Mark
 249    Fisher for reporting and Jani Hakala for debugging and patch).
 250  - Fixed an inadvertant error during error reporting in the `numerator`
 251    and `denominator` procedures when passed non-finite flonums (#1730).
 252  - Fixed a bug where optimisations for `irregex-match?` would cause
 253    runtime errors due to the inlined specialisations not being
 254    fully-expanded (see #1690).
 255  - Irregex has been updated to upstream 0.9.10, which fixes behaviour
 256    of irregex-replace/all with positive lookbehind so all matches are
 257    replaced instead of only the first (reported by Kay Rhodes), and
 258    a regression regarding replacing empty matches which was introduced
 259    by the fixes in 0.9.7 (reported by Sandra Snan).  Also, the
 260    http-url shorthand now allows any top-level domain and the old
 261    "top-level-domain" now also supports "edu" (fixed by Sandra Snan).
 262    Also, a problem was fixed with capturing groups inside a kleene
 263    star, which could sometimes return incorrect parts of the match.
 264    Finally, "bol" handling was fixed to handle newlines consistently
 265    so that multiple matches don't overlap (reported by Sandra Snan).
 266  - current-milliseconds has been deprecated in favor of the name
 267    current-process-milliseconds, to avoid confusion due to naming
 268    of current-milliseconds versus current-seconds, which do something
 269    quite different.  Also, its definition has been tweaked to
 270    guarantee that it returns the time since process startup.  On
 271    Windows, it will now return sane values after 24 days of uptime.
 272    On UNIX, the values returned will be precise to the millisecond
 273    instead of rounded down to the nearest second at startup (which
 274    would result in erratic startup times).
 275  - The default mode for files created by `file-open' has been changed
 276    to 0666 (plus whatever change the effective umask applies), rather
 277    than 0744 (see #1698).
 278  - Fixed type database entry for "log" with second arg (fixes #1725).
 279  - Made topological-sort behave better when dependency target is listed
 280    multiple times by concatenating dependencies (fixes #1185).
 281
 282- Module system
 283  - Reexported macros now work when the reexporting module redefines
 284    identifiers from the original (fixes #1757, reported by Sandra Snan).
 285  - When using "except" in "import" to omit reexported macros,
 286    they are really not imported (#1771, reported by Sandra Snan).
 287
 288- Runtime system
 289  - Sleeping primordial thread doesn't forget mutations made to
 290    parameters in interrupt handlers anymore. (See #1638. Fix
 291    contributed by Sebastien Marie)
 292  - A feature corresponding to the word size is available
 293    regardless of the word size (#1693)
 294  - The default maximum heap size on 64-bit platforms is now the
 295    theoretical maximum addressable memory size (#1675).  Use -:m
 296    if you would like to override this at run-time.
 297  - Deprecated C_(a_i_current_)milliseconds in favor of
 298    C_(a_i_)current_process_milliseconds to match the Scheme-level
 299    deprecation of current-milliseconds.
 300  - Officially deprecated C_pair() in favor of C_a_pair(); it has
 301    been deprecated for years.
 302  - At program cleanup, finalizers are only forced when the live
 303    finalizer count is non-zero
 304  - The symbol `srfi-87` has been added to the list of built-in
 305    feature identifiers.
 306  - Garbage collection algorithm has been changed to reduce thrashing
 307    when heap is almost full, by growing the heap sooner.  A new -:hf
 308    option was added to tweak when heap growth should occur.
 309  - Added `-:R' runtime option to initialize rand() state
 310    deterministically (should help with #1650 and benchmarking).
 311
 312- Compiler
 313  - Statically linked programs using built-in libraries are supported
 314    again (fixes #1788, a regression from 5.2.0).
 315  - Avoid re-using argvector when inline rest operations are being
 316    used in CPS calls (#1703, thanks to Jakob L. Keuze).
 317  - An `emit-types-file` declaration has been added, which corresponds
 318    to the compiler flag of the same name (#1644, thanks to Marco Maggi
 319    for the suggestion).
 320  - Fixed a bug caused by a bad interaction between two optimizations:
 321    argvector rest ops would be applied even if a procedure already got
 322    its rest arg consed at the call site (#1756, thanks to Sandra Snan).
 323
 324- Build system
 325  - Fix build with tcc.
 326  - Fix a few tests on Windows so the suite passes once again.
 327  - Auto-configure at build time on most platforms. Cross-compilation
 328    still requires PLATFORM to be set, and it can still be provided
 329    manually, but it is no longer required in the common case.
 330  - Fix Linux to MingW cross-compilation (#1768, thanks to Théo Cavignac)
 331  - The `clean' target for make now also removes build configuration files.
 332  - The `distclean' target for make has been removed (now `clean' does what
 333    `distclean' used to do).
 334
 335- Tools
 336  - Fix a problem with egg installation scripts on Windows, where the
 337    platform was not correctly identified, depending on the shell used
 338    during installation of the core system (thanks again to Mark Fisher
 339    for reporting and helping in finding the culprit).
 340  - Fixed a bug in chicken-install (#1744) that would cause
 341    `Error: (string->number) bad argument type: #!eof` in some cases.
 342  - If chicken-install has a program prefix/suffix, it now writes to a
 343    cache directory matching its program name (#1713, thanks to Alice Maz)
 344  - Fixed bug in chicken-install regarding variable quotation on UNIX-like
 345    systems which prevented installation into paths with spaces (#1685).
 346  - Fixed a similar bug in chicken-install for paths with spaces on mingw
 347    and mingw-msys (#1727, thanks to Josh Helzer for reporting and Vasilij
 348    Schneidermann for the patch).
 349
 350- Module system
 351  - Fixed a memory leak when calling (import) multiple times in a row
 352    on the same module (#1772; reported by "plugd" on IRC).
 353
 3545.2.0
 355
 356- Core libraries
 357  - Fix `memory-statistics` by returning semi-space bytes and used
 358    semi-space bytes like the documentation says. Old implementation
 359    returned full-heap size and (full-heap - used-semi-space).
 360  - for-each and map now behave consistently in compiled and interpreted
 361    mode, like in SRFI-1.  They now stop when the shortest list is
 362    exhausted instead of raising an exception (fixes #1422).
 363  - There is now a srfi-88 module which contains just the three
 364    procedures from the (chicken keyword) module defined by the SRFI.
 365  - A feature identifier named "srfi-88" is now registered.
 366  - The procedures `record-printer` and `set-record-printer!` and a
 367    corresponding SRFI-17 setter have been added. These deprecate
 368    `define-record-printer` which isn't a "real" definition (see #1294).
 369  - On Windows, `decompose-directory` no longer crashes when a drive
 370    letter is present in the supplied path string.
 371  - irregex-replace[/all] have been fixed for empty matches, so they
 372    will no longer drop characters and ignore the replacement (#1661).
 373  - Irregex has been updated to upstream 0.9.7, which also improves
 374    how empty matches are treated in irregex-fold and irregex-split.
 375
 376- Runtime system
 377  - Quoted empty keywords like ||: and :|| are now read like prescribed
 378    by SRFI-88 in the corresponding keyword mode.  Symbols containing
 379    quoted empty prefixes or suffixes like ||:abc and abc:|| will be
 380    read correctly as symbols now (fixes #1625, thanks to Andy Bennett).
 381  - IEEE floating point negative zero is now properly handled: it can
 382    be read, written and distinguished by eqv? and equal?, but not =
 383    (fixes #1627, thanks to John Cowan).
 384  - ##sys#check-exact and its C implementations C_i_check_exact and
 385    C_i_check_exact_2 have been deprecated (see also #1631).
 386  - When garbage collector is manually invoked from a finalizer, raise
 387    an error instead of hanging forever (fixes #1586).
 388  - define-record-type will now give an error if the constructor
 389    definition refers to field that's not listed elsewhere (see #1633)
 390  - Added new -:hu option to set the memory usage low watermark
 391    percentage at which the heap should be shrunk, and changed the
 392    calculation to actually reflect this (see #1379).
 393
 394- Compiler
 395  - Fixed a bug in lfa2 pass which caused "if" or "cond" nodes to be
 396    incorrectly unboxed if the "else" branch had a flonum result type
 397    (#1624, thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)
 398  - Inline files no longer refer to unexported foreign stub functions
 399    (fixes #1440, thanks to "megane").
 400  - In some cases, rest argument lists do not need to be reified, which
 401    should make using optional arguments and case-lambda faster (#1623).
 402  - Values from foreign types which have an argument or return value
 403    converter are no longer inferred to have the Scheme type which
 404    corresponds to the raw foreign type, which was incorrect (#1649).
 405
 406- Module system
 407  - Trying to export a foreign variable, define-inlined procedure or
 408    define-constant variable gives a friendly error instead of saying
 409    the variable doesn't exist (fixes #1346).
 410  - When modules are registered, they no longer pollute the global
 411    environment with imports made in that module (fixes #1548)
 412
 413- Tools
 414  - The new "-module-registration" options causes module registration
 415    code to always be included in the program, even when it has also
 416    been emitted as a separate file (for example with "-J").
 417  - chicken-install now correctly checks server response code to avoid
 418    interpreting error response bodies (like 404, 500) as Scheme code.
 419  - chicken-install now follows HTTP redirects when downloading eggs.
 420  - chicken-install will now change to the correct drive before
 421    attempting to change to the egg directory (fixes #1647).
 422
 423
 4245.1.0
 425
 426- Core libraries
 427  - Symbols ending or starting with a colon are now always pipe-quoted
 428    when written by `write` to ensure they can be read back with a
 429    different keyword-style setting.
 430  - Read-write invariance of special symbols starting with #! other
 431    than #!key, #!rest or #!optional is now preserved (#1572).
 432  - When using (set-file-position!) on a port, its EOF status will now
 433    be reset.
 434  - In (chicken file posix), the values of perm/irgrp, perm/iwgrp,
 435    perm/ixgrp, perm/iroth, perm/iwoth and perm/ixoth are now correctly
 436    defined (they were all for "usr"; #1602, thanks to Eric Hoffman).
 437  - In (chicken file posix), `file-truncate` now accepts also accepts
 438    port objects, for consistency with other file procedures.
 439    All such procedures from (chicken file posix) now have the correct
 440    types in types.db (fixes #1609, thanks to Robert Jensen).
 441  - Add the system-config-directory and system-cache-directory procedures
 442    in the chicken.platform module. These procedures follow the XDG
 443    specification and also give sensible results on Windows.
 444  - Fix get-environment from (chicken process-context) to raise an
 445    error when passed #f instead of segfaulting.
 446  - Qualified symbols (##foo#bar style) are no longer encoded by a
 447    byte prefix inside the symbol name.  This ensures read-write
 448    invariance of symbols which start with a low-byte character
 449    (fixes #1077, except for keywords, which start with NUL bytes).
 450  - Fix a missing export (list->s64vector) in SRFI-4.
 451
 452- Runtime system
 453  - Keywords are now distinct types; they are not a subtype of symbols.
 454  - Use arc4random on FreeBSD (thanks to Tobias Kortkamp and gahr)
 455  - Removed the unused, undocumented (and incorrect!) C functions
 456    C_delete_symbol_table and C_set_symbol_table.
 457  - Continuations which discard additional values beyond the first no
 458    longer accept multiple values via direct invocation after being
 459    captured through `call/cc`, only via `values` (revert of #1390,
 460    due to #1601)
 461  - SRFI-4 vector predicates, reference, set and length procedures
 462    should now be faster in tight loops as they're inlineable (#757).
 463  - Keywords are now interned in a separate keyword table, not in the
 464    standard symbol table.  This brings full read-write invariance
 465    for symbols (they can now also start with NUL bytes).  Keywords
 466    no longer have plists.  Fixes #1576.
 467  - Increased the "binary compatibility version" to 11.
 468
 469- Compiler
 470  - Restored optimized implementations of =, +, -, /, * and quotient in
 471    fixnum-arithmetic mode (fixes #1604 mostly; thanks to "chickendan").
 472  - Added an optimization pass for reducing the amount of boxing of
 473    intermediate floating point values, enabled by the "-lfa2" compiler
 474    option.
 475  - The "lfa2" pass is now enabled at optimization levels 2 or higher.
 476
 477- Module system
 478  - When you try to import the module you are currently defining into
 479    itself, an error will be raised. This prevents an infinite loop in
 480    the compiler when later trying to import that same module (fixes
 481    #1506, thanks to Kristian Lein-Mathisen).
 482
 483- Foreign function interface
 484  - Improved hygiene in FFI macro expansions, which means you don't
 485     have to import "scheme" or "(chicken base)" for them to work.
 486
 487- Type system
 488  - It is now possible to quote free variables in type declarations,
 489     which acts as shorthand for `forall' (thanks to "megane")
 490
 491- Tools
 492  - csi now uses (system-config-directory) to find csirc and falls back to
 493    $HOME/.csirc when needed.
 494  - chicken-install now uses (system-config-directory) to find a user
 495    defined setup.defaults file ; it also uses (system-cache-directory)
 496    for its egg cache directory when the CHICKEN_EGG_CACHE environment
 497    variable is not defined.
 498
 499- Egg specifications
 500  - Allows "cond-expand" and "error" forms in egg specification files.
 501  - Add "c-object" and "object" properties to link separately compiled
 502     C objects into CHICKEN code.
 503
 504
 5055.0.0
 506
 507- Runtime system
 508  - Added support for the full numeric tower, including various new
 509    procedures taken from the "numbers" egg.  All calculations will
 510    now return exact numbers where possible, so code relying on flonums
 511    being returned may need to be changed if rational numbers do not
 512    provide the desired performance.
 513  - Port directionality has been generalized from a simple input/output
 514    flag to a bitmap, to allow for multidirectional ports.
 515  - Weak symbol GC is faster, simpler, and can now collect all
 516    unreferenced symbols instead of a maximum of 997 per major GC.
 517  - The -:w option has been removed; symbols are now always collected.
 518  - Increased the "binary compatibility version" to 9.
 519  - Continuations which discard additional values beyond the first now
 520    also accept multiple values via direct invocation after being
 521    captured through `call/cc`, not just via `values` (#1390)
 522  - Removed the deprecated C_locative_ref and C_mutate2 C functions.
 523  - The trace buffer no longer holds on to thread objects, allowing them to
 524    be garbage collected sooner (#1356, thanks to Kristian Lein-Mathisen)
 525  - On Cygwin and MinGW, the "build-platform" now corresponds to the
 526    tool chain used (gnu, clang, unknown) like on *nix, while the
 527    software-version is now "cygwin" or "mingw32" instead of "unknown".
 528    This also means the features list will now contain the tool chain
 529    on all platforms.
 530  - Symbols starting with #% are no longer treated specially and need
 531    to be quoted with pipes. This makes the "%" sign available for use
 532    in custom/user-defined sharp-sign read syntax.
 533
 534- Compiler
 535  - Fixed an off by one allocation problem in generated C code for (list ...).
 536  - The "-scrutinize" compiler option has been removed.
 537  - The "-module" compiler option (aliased as "-m") now expects a module name.
 538  - The generated C output of the compiler is now deterministic: it
 539    will be bit-for-bit identical when compiling the same Scheme file
 540    with the same version of the compiler.
 541  - the "-consult-type-file" and "-emit-type-file" options have been renamed
 542    to "-consult-types-file" and "-emit-types-file", respectively.
 543
 544- Tools
 545  - The new "-link" option to csc allows linking with objects from extensions.
 546  - The new "-libdir" option to csc allows overriding the runtime library
 547    directory.
 548  - The ambiguous "-l<libname>" option for csc has been removed (#1193).
 549  - Removed deprecated "-n" shorthand for "-emit-inline-file" from csc.
 550  - Removed "chicken-bug" tool.
 551
 552- Core libraries
 553  - Removed support for memory-mapped files (posix), queues
 554    (data-structures), binary-search (data-structures), scan-input-lines
 555    (utils), group-information (posix) object-eviction (lolevel), and
 556    compile-file (utils). These are now available as eggs.
 557  - Removed the srfi-1, srfi-13, srfi-14, srfi-18, srfi-69, and utils
 558    units. These are now available as eggs.
 559  - Added the `executable-pathname` procedure for retrieving a path to
 560    the currently-running executable.
 561  - Removed all support for SWIG.
 562  - Removed interrupts-enabled declaration specifier.
 563  - `sleep` now suspends the current thread when threading is enabled,
 564    otherwise it sleeps the process. The new `process-sleep` procedure
 565    in unit posix can be used to sleep the process unconditionally.
 566  - `with-error-output-to-port' from the ports module has been renamed
 567    to the more common `with-error-to-port', and `with-error-to-string'
 568    has been added for completeness (thanks to Michael Silver).
 569  - A new `make-bidirectional-port' procedure has been added to the
 570    ports unit that will combine separate input- and output- ports into
 571    a single bidirectional port.
 572  - New `input-port-open?` and `output-port-open?` procedures have been
 573    added for testing whether a port is open in a specific direction.
 574  - An `include-relative` form has been added to the (chicken base) module.
 575    This works like `load-relative` but for textual inclusion.
 576  - Keywords are now always written in "portable" style by WRITE, so
 577    that the reader's keyword style doesn't need to match the writer's.
 578  - The environment variable `CHICKEN_PREFIX` has been removed.
 579  - Added the `glob->sre` procedure to the irregex library.
 580  - Removed the `get-host-name' and `system-information' procedures.
 581    These are available in the "system-information" egg.
 582  - Removed the `eval-when`, `select` and `ensure` macros.  These are
 583    available in the "miscmacros" egg.
 584  - Removed the require-extension-for-syntax macro.
 585  - Renamed bit-set? to bit->boolean because of swapped argument order
 586    with respect to SRFI-33 and SRFI-60, which was confusing (fixes
 587    #1385, thanks to Lemonboy).
 588  - file-{read,write,execute}-access will now raise an exception when
 589    the file doesn't exist or some other non-access related problem is
 590    detected (fixes #1386, thanks to Vasilij Schneidermann).
 591  - `change-file-mode` was renamed to set-file-permissions! and SRFI-17
 592    generalized set! support has been added for `file-permissions`.
 593    This procedure now also accepts a file descriptor or a port.
 594  - `file-permissions` now returns one value: the permission integer.
 595  - `read-file` has been renamed to `read-list`.
 596  - `read-all` was dropped, as `read-string` with #f as its NUM argument
 597     is equivalent.
 598  - `read-lines` and `read-all` no longer accept a string naming a file,
 599     only ports.
 600  - The procedures for random numbers have been reimplemented;
 601    access to system-specific entropy is available, together with a reasonably
 602    good pseudo random number generator (WELL512).
 603  - `glob` now returns an empty list for non-existent or inaccessible
 604    directories, instead of erroring out.
 605  - `file-copy' and `file-move' have been renamed to `copy-file' and
 606    `move-file', for consistency with `delete-file' and `rename-file'.
 607  - `rename-file' now refuses to overwrite an existing file unless an
 608    optional "clobber" argument is provided.
 609  - The `r4rs` module no longer exports `eval`, which was not in R4RS.
 610  - `process`, `process*` and `process-execute` now expect lists of the form
 611    (("NAME" . "VALUE") ...) instead of the previous (("NAME=VALUE") ...)
 612    as their environment argument.
 613  - `repository-path` is now a parameter containing a list of strings instead
 614    of a string, as the search path for libraries can now contain multiple
 615    directories.
 616  - `file-read-access?`, `file-write-access?` and `file-execute-access?` have
 617    been renamed `file-readable?`, `file-writable?` and `file-executable?`
 618    into the (chicken file) module.
 619
 620- Module system
 621  - The compiler has been modularised, for improved namespacing.  This
 622    means names from the compiler should not leak out into the compiled
 623    program's (macro) namespace anymore.
 624  - The core units have been converted to modules under the "chicken"
 625    namespace.
 626  - Added support for list-style library names.
 627  - The "use" and "use-for-syntax" special forms have been removed
 628    in favor of "import" and "import-for-syntax" to reduce confusion.
 629  - Module imports are now lexically scoped: identifiers provided by
 630    an (import ...) inside (let ...) won't be visible outside that let.
 631  - Modules implementing an interface can now correctly export extra
 632    identifiers (bug reported by Martin Schneeweis, fix by "megane").
 633
 634- Syntax expander
 635  - Removed support for (define-syntax (foo e r c) ...), which was
 636    undocumented and not officially supported anyway.
 637  - Removed support for normal "lambda" forms as syntax transformers,
 638    which has been deprecated since 4.8.0.
 639  - define and friends are now aggressively rejected in "expression
 640    contexts" (i.e., anywhere but toplevel or as internal defines).
 641  - define-record and define-record-type now create record types
 642    which are tagged with the module in which they're defined, so
 643    predicates no longer return #t for records with the same tag
 644    defined in another module. This tag is now also available under
 645    an identifier that matches the record type name (fixes #1342).
 646  - `include` now splices included expressions in the context in which
 647    the inclusion appears and does not treat the expressions as toplevel
 648    expressions by default.
 649
 650- Eggs management
 651  - Egg-installation and building has been completely overhauled.
 652  - .meta + .setup files have been merged into a single declarative
 653    ".egg" file.
 654  - More static checks for egg descriptions, simplified generation
 655    of OS-specific build + install commands that is (hopefully)
 656    more practical for package maintainers.
 657  - Egg sources are cached locally to reduce download and rebuild
 658    times.
 659  - Dropped many obscure or unimportant options and features from
 660    `chicken-install`: (`-keep-installed`, `-reinstall`, `-proxy`,
 661    `-no-install`, `-username`, `-password`, `-init`, `-deploy`,
 662    `-keep-going`, `-scan`, `-csi`, `-show-depends`, `-show-foreign-depends`,
 663    `-prefix`.
 664  - Added new "-from-list" option to chicken-install.
 665  - Eggs can now be installed and located in multiple directories,
 666    using the `CHICKEN_REPOSITORY_PATH` +
 667    `CHICKEN_INSTALL_REPOSITORY`
 668    environment variables.
 669  - Static compilation of eggs is now fully supported and static
 670    versions of compiled eggs are available by default.
 671  - In a statically built chicken, the egg-tools ("chicken-install", "...-status",
 672    "...-uninstall") are still available, but only support static compilation
 673    of eggs.
 674
 675- Foreign function interface
 676  - The foreign type specifier "ssize_t" is now accepted, and "size_t"
 677    arguments now only accept positive integers.  Return values of
 678    type size_t are no longer truncated on 32-bit platforms.
 679
 680
 6814.13.0
 682
 683- Security fixes
 684  - CVE-2017-6949: Remove unchecked malloc() call in SRFI-4 constructors
 685    when allocating in non-GC memory, resulting in potential 1-word
 686    buffer overrun and/or segfault (thanks to Lemonboy).
 687  - CVE-2017-9334: `length' no longer crashes on improper lists (fixes
 688    #1375, thanks to "megane").
 689  - CVE-2017-11343: The randomization factor of the symbol table was
 690    set before the random seed was set, causing it to have a fixed value
 691    on many platforms.
 692
 693- Core Libraries
 694  - Unit "posix": If file-lock, file-lock/blocking or file-unlock are
 695    interrupted by a signal, we now retry (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger).
 696  - char-ready? on string ports now also returns #t at EOF, as per R5RS;
 697    in other words, it always returns #t (thanks to Moritz Heidkamp)
 698  - Unit srfi-4: Fixed typo that broke SRFI-17 generalised set! syntax
 699    on s8vectors (thanks to Kristian Lein-Mathisen).
 700  - Large literals no longer crash with "invalid encoded numeric literal"
 701    on mingw-64 (#1344, thanks to Lemonboy).
 702  - Unit irregex: Fix bug that prevented multibyte UTF-8 character sets
 703    from being matched correctly (Thanks to Lemonboy and Chunyang Xu).
 704
 705- Runtime system:
 706  - The profiler no longer uses malloc from a signal handler which may
 707    cause deadlocks (#1414, thanks to Lemonboy).
 708  - The scheduler no longer indirectly hangs on to the old thread
 709    when switching to a new one, which caused excessive memory
 710    consumption (#1367, thanks to "megane").
 711  - C++ programs no longer fail with a symbol lookup error when
 712    compiled with debugger support (-d3 or -debug-info).
 713
 714- Syntax expander
 715  - Renaming an identifier twice no longer results in an undo of the
 716    rename (fixes #1362, thanks to "megane").
 717
 718- Build system
 719  - Fixed broken compilation on NetBSD, due to missing _NETBSD_SOURCE.
 720  - Fixed compilation on DragonflyBSD due to no feature macro support
 721    in its standard C library (thanks to Markus Pfeiffer).
 722
 723- Compiler
 724  - The scrutinizer no longer uses 'fixnum as the type for fixnums
 725    that might not fit into a fixnum on 32-bit architectures.
 726
 727- Foreign function interface
 728  - Correctly calculate memory requirements of Scheme objects produced
 729    from foreign types with "const" qualifiers, avoiding memory
 730    corruption (#1424, thanks to Vasilij Schneidermann and Lemonboy)
 731  - Do not read beyond temporary stack buffer, which could lead to
 732    a crash when returning from a foreign callback (#1428).
 733
 7344.12.0
 735
 736- Security fixes
 737  - CVE-2016-6830: Fix buffer overrun due to excessively long argument
 738    or environment lists in process-execute and process-spawn (#1308).
 739    This also removes unnecessary limitations on the length of
 740    these lists (thanks to Vasilij Schneidermann).
 741  - CVE-2016-6831: Fix memory leak in process-execute and
 742    process-spawn.  If, during argument and environment list
 743    processing, a list item isn't a string, an exception is thrown,
 744    in which case previously malloc()ed strings weren't freed.
 745  - CVE-2016-9954: Irregex has been updated to 0.9.6, which fixes
 746    an exponential explosion in compilation of nested "+" patterns.
 747
 748- Compiler:
 749  - define-constant now correctly keeps symbol values quoted.
 750  - Warnings are now emitted when using vector-{ref,set!} or one
 751    of take, drop, list-ref or list-tail with an out of range index
 752    for vectors and proper lists of a definitely known length.
 753  - The scrutinizer will no longer drop knowledge of the length of a
 754    vector.  It still drops types of its contents (which may be mutated).
 755  - Fixed incorrect argvector restoration after GC in directly
 756    recursive functions (#1317).
 757  - "Direct" procedure invocations now also maintain debug info (#894).
 758
 759- Syntax expander
 760  - DSSSL lambda lists have improved hygiene, so they don't need
 761    the chicken or scheme modules to be imported in full (#806).
 762  - The let-optionals* macro no longer needs "quote", "car" and "cdr"
 763    to be imported and bound to their default values (#806).
 764
 765- Runtime system:
 766  - C_locative_ref has been deprecated in favor of C_a_i_locative_ref,
 767    which is faster because it is inlined (#1260, thanks to Kooda).
 768  - The default error handler now truncates very long condition
 769    messages (thanks to Lemonboy).
 770  - Weak symbol GC (-:w) no longer drops random symbols (#1173).
 771  - The number of arguments to procedures, both via "apply" and direct
 772    invocation, are now limited only by the C stack size (#1098).
 773  - "time" macro now shows peak memory usage (#1318, thanks to Kooda).
 774  - Avoid crashes in ffi callbacks after GC (#1337, thanks to cosarara).
 775
 776- Core libraries:
 777  - Irregex has been updated to 0.9.5, which fixes matching of all "bow"
 778    occurrances beyond the first with irregex-fold (upstream issue #14).
 779  - Keywords are more consistently read/written, like symbols (#1332).
 780  - SRFI-39: When jumping out of a parameterized dynamic extent,
 781    "parameterize" now remember the actual values, so when jumping back
 782    in, they are restored (fixes #1336, thanks to Joo ChurlSoo).
 783    This was a regression caused by the fix for #1227.
 784
 785- Tools:
 786  - "chicken-install"
 787    - When installing eggs in deploy mode with "-keep-installed", eggs
 788      under the prefix won't unnecessarily be reinstalled (#1144).
 789    - Added new option "-no-install-deps" which inhibits automatic
 790      installation of dependencies, useful with "-prefix" (#1298).
 791
 792
 7934.11.0
 794
 795- Security fixes
 796  - Specialisation rules for string-{ref,set!}, bit-set?
 797    and move-memory no longer use unchecked C functions which could
 798    result in undefined behaviour, including buffer overruns (#1216).
 799
 800- Platform support
 801  - CHICKEN now supports the Linux X32 ABI (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf).
 802
 803- Tools
 804  - Feathers now has a more neutral color scheme and larger font size.
 805  - With the -dir option, feathers can now correctly find source code.
 806
 807- Runtime system:
 808  - The calling convention of CPS procedures has been changed to
 809    use "argument vectors" instead of C calling convention.
 810  - The C API of C_values(), C_do_apply() and how to invoke CPS
 811    functions has changed.  The C_procN() macros have disappeared.
 812    The manual example in "Accessing external objects" for C_values
 813    has been updated.  See also the "numbers" egg for examples on
 814    how to support pre- and post-4.10.1 CHICKENs simultaneously.
 815  - Apply hack is no longer used; the limitation of 128 arguments
 816    has been lifted for platforms which had no apply hack.
 817  - Increased the "binary compatibility version" to 8.
 818  - Delivery of signals in other OS-level threads is now dealt with
 819    in a more robust way (#1232) (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger).
 820  - Compiled programs with large literals won't crash on startup (#1221).
 821  - Comparisons of closures now behave in a stable way, whether or not
 822    the code was compiled with the -no-lambda-info option (#1041).
 823  - The signal handling code can no longer trigger "stack overflow" or
 824    "recursion too deep or circular data encountered" errors (#1283).
 825
 826- Compiler:
 827  - Specializations on implicit "or" types like "number" or "boolean" now
 828    work, removing the requirement for the inferred types to match
 829    declared types exactly.  Specializations are matched from first to
 830    last to resolve ambiguities (#1214).
 831  - Compiler rewrites for char{<,>,<=,>=,=}? are now safe (#1122).
 832  - When requesting to emit import libraries that don't exist, the
 833     compiler now gives an error instead of quietly continuing (#1188).
 834  - Don't silently truncate huge literals (thanks to Claude Marinier).
 835
 836- Core libraries
 837  - try-compile from setup-api cleans up temporary output files (#1213).
 838  - SRFI-18: thread-join! no longer gives an error when passed a
 839    thread in the "sleeping" state (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger)
 840  - SRFI-18: mutex-lock! will not set ownership of mutexes when
 841    passed #f as the owner (#1231), not disown a mutex from owner if
 842    locking fails for timeout and not keep the last thread which held
 843    a mutex until the next lock (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger).
 844  - SRFI-39: When a parameter's "guard" procedure raises an exception,
 845    "parameterize" now correctly resets the original values of all
 846    parameters (fixes #1227, thanks to Joo ChurlSoo).
 847  - Irregex has been updated to 0.9.4, which fixes severe performance
 848    problems with {n,m} repeating patterns (thanks to Caolan McMahon).
 849  - Unit "posix": The following posix procedures now work on port
 850    objects: file-stat, file-size, file-owner, file-permissions,
 851    file-modification-time, file-access-time, file-change-time,
 852    file-type and all procedures using file-type. These are:
 853    regular-file?, symbolic-link?, block-device?, character-device?
 854    fifo? and socket?.
 855  - Unit "posix": When "file-close" is interrupted it will retry,
 856    to avoid leaking descriptors (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger).
 857  - Unit "data-structures": alist-{update[!],ref} were made consistent
 858    with srfi-1 in the argument order of comparison procedures.
 859  - Unit "lolevel": locative-ref has been fixed for locatives of u32
 860    and s32vectors (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger for pointing this out).
 861  - string->number now signals exceptions if passed a bad base instead
 862    of segfaulting (#1272; reported by "Tilpner" on IRC).
 863
 864- Tools
 865  - A debugger is now available, known as "feathers", which allows
 866    basic source-level debugging of compiled Scheme code.
 867  - A statistical profiler has been added, enabling sampling-based
 868    runtime profiling of compiled programs.
 869  - "chicken-install"
 870    - When installing eggs in deploy mode, already satisfied
 871      dependencies aren't reinstalled every time (#1106).
 872  - "chicken-uninstall"
 873    - -prefix and -deploy options were added, matching chicken-install.
 874  - "chicken-status"
 875    - -prefix and -deploy options were added, matching chicken-install.
 876  - The -sudo and -s options for chicken-install and chicken-uninstall
 877    now honor a "SUDO" environment variable (thanks to Timo Myyrä).
 878
 879- Syntax expander
 880  - Mixed internal define/define-values are now correctly ordered, so
 881    later defines can refer to earlier define-values (#1274).
 882
 8834.10.0
 884
 885- Security fixes
 886  - CVE-2014-6310: Use POSIX poll() on Android platform to avoid
 887    potential select() buffer overrun.
 888  - CVE-2014-9651: substring-index[-ci] no longer scans beyond string
 889    boundaries.
 890  - CVE-2015-4556: string-translate* no longer scans beyond string
 891    boundaries.
 892
 893- Core libraries
 894  - alist-ref from unit data-structures now gives an error when passed
 895    a non-list, for consistency with assv/assq/assoc.
 896  - Unit tcp now implicitly depends on ports instead of extras.
 897     This may break programs which don't use modules and forgot to
 898     require extras but use procedures from it.
 899  - SRFI-13: fix string-copy! in cases source and destination strings'
 900    memory areas overlap (#1135).
 901  - SRFI-1: Check argument types in lset and list= procedures (#1085).
 902  - Fixed another, similar bug in move-memory! for overlapping memory.
 903  - Fixed broken specialisation for move-memory! on pointer types.
 904  - Fixed broken specialisation for irregex-match-num-submatches.
 905  - Fixed bug in make-kmp-restart-vector from SRFI-13.
 906  - Removed deprecated implicit expansion of $VAR- and ~ in pathnames.
 907     The ~-expansion functionality is now available in the
 908     "pathname-expand" egg (#1001, #1079) (thanks to Florian Zumbiehl).
 909  - normalize-pathname has been simplified to avoid adding trailing
 910     slashes or dots (#1153, thanks to Michele La Monaca and Mario Goulart).
 911
 912- Unit srfi-4:
 913   - write-u8vector has been made more efficient (thanks to Thomas Hintz).
 914   - read-u8vector has been made more efficient (thanks to Andy Bennett
 915      for pointing this out and testing an improvement).
 916
 917- Unit lolevel:
 918  - Restore long-lost but still documented "vector-like?" procedure (#983)
 919
 920- Unit "files":
 921  - normalize-pathname no longer considers paths starting with ".//"
 922    as absolute (#1202, reported by Haochi Kiang).
 923
 924- Unit "posix":
 925  - set-file-position! now allows negative positions for seek/cur (thanks
 926    to Seth Alves).
 927  - file-mkstemp now works correctly on Windows, it now returns valid
 928    file descriptors (#819, thanks to Michele La Monaca).
 929  - create-directory on Windows now creates all intermediate
 930    directories when passed #t as second parameter.
 931
 932- Runtime system:
 933  - Removed several deprecated, undocumented parts of the C interface:
 934    C_zap_strings, C_stack_check, C_retrieve, C_retrieve_proc,
 935    C_retrieve_symbol_proc, C_i_foreign_number_vector_argumentp,
 936    C_display_flonum, C_enumerate_symbols
 937  - Removed several deprecated and undocumented internal procedures:
 938    ##sys#zap-strings, ##sys#round, ##sys#foreign-number-vector-argument,
 939    ##sys#check-port-mode, ##sys#check-port*
 940  - SIGBUS, SIGILL and SIGFPE will now cause proper exceptions instead
 941    of panicking (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger).
 942
 943- Module system
 944  - Allow functor arguments to be optional, with default implementations.
 945  - Fixed a bug that prevented functors from being instantiated with
 946     built-in modules.
 947  - Fixed generation of import libraries for instantiated functors
 948     (#1149, thanks to Juergen Lorenz).
 949
 950- Syntax expander
 951  - define-values, set!-values and letrec-values now support full lambda
 952    lists as binding forms
 953  - cond expands correctly when a constant is used in combination with =>
 954     (thanks to Michele La Monaca)
 955
 956- C API
 957  - Removed deprecated C_get_argument[_2] and
 958    C_get_environment_variable[_2] functions.
 959  - C_mutate2 has been deprecated in favor of C_mutate
 960  - chicken.h can be included in C++ programs in strict C++11 mode
 961     without compiler errors on Linux (thanks to "Izaak").
 962
 963- Foreign function interface
 964  - The foreign type specifier "scheme-pointer" now accepts an optional
 965    C pointer type (thanks to Moritz Heidkamp and Kristian Lein-Mathisen).
 966  - Type hinting for foreign-primitives now allows returning multiple
 967    values when no return type has been specified.
 968
 969- Compiler
 970  - Fixed an off by one allocation problem in generated C code for (list ...).
 971
 972- Build system
 973  - MANDIR was renamed to MAN1DIR and TOPMANDIR was renamed to MANDIR
 974     in order to comply with standard Makefile practice in UNIX.
 975  - INCDIR was renamed to CHICKENINCDIR, and now derives from
 976     INCLUDEDIR, which defaults to $(PREFIX)/include
 977  - BINDIR, LIBDIR, SHAREDIR, INCLUDEDIR, MANDIR, MAN1DIR, DOCDIR,
 978     CHICKENINCDIR and CHICKENLIBDIR will now also be taken from
 979     the environment, if present (like PLATFORM, DESTDIR and PREFIX).
 980
 981- Tools
 982  - "csc"
 983    - On Cygwin, -static now works again (thanks to Michele La Monaca)
 984  - "chicken-install"
 985    - When using chicken-install -retrieve, and an error occurs during
 986       retrieval (or the egg doesn't exist), the egg's directory is
 987       now properly cleaned up (#1109, thanks to Alex Charlton)
 988  - "chicken"
 989    - The -r5rs-syntax option did nothing; this has been fixed.
 990
 9914.9.0
 992
 993- Security fixes
 994  - CVE-2014-3776: read-u8vector! no longer reads beyond its buffer when
 995    length is #f (thanks to Seth Alves).
 996  - CVE-2013-4385: read-string! no longer reads beyond its buffer when
 997    length is #f.
 998  - CVE-2013-1874: ./.csirc is no longer loaded from the current directory
 999    upon startup of csi, which could lead to untrusted code execution.
 1000    (thanks to Florian Zumbiehl)
1001  - CVE-2013-2024: On *nix, the qs procedure now single-quotes everything
1002    instead of relying on a blacklist of shell characters to be escaped.
1003    On Windows, it properly duplicates double-quote characters.  (thanks
1004    to Florian Zumbiehl)
1005  - CVE-2013-2075: Use POSIX poll() in other places where select() was
1006    still being used.  (thanks to Florian Zumbiehl and Joerg Wittenberger)
1007  - CVE-2012-6122: Use POSIX poll() on systems where available.  This avoids a
1008    design flaw in select(); it supports no more than FD_SETSIZE descriptors.
1009
1010- Core libraries
1011  - Fix subvector when the TO optional argument equals the given vector
1012    length (#1097)
1013  - Unit extras now implicitly depends on ports.  ports no longer
1014     implicitly depends on extras.  This may break programs which don't
1015     use modules and forgot to require ports but use procedures from it.
1016  - Support has been added for the space-safe R7RS macro "delay-force".
1017  - Export file-type from the posix unit (thanks to Alan Post).
1018  - SRFI-4 s8vectors now work correctly in compiled code on PowerPC and ARM.
1019  - thread-join! now works correctly even if the waiting thread was
1020     prematurely woken up by a signal.
1021  - unsetenv has been fixed on Windows.
1022  - The process procedure has been fixed on Windows.
1023  - Nonblocking behaviour on sockets has been fixed on Windows.
1024  - Possible race condition while handling TCP errors has been fixed.
1025  - The posix unit will no longer hang upon any error in Windows.
1026  - resize-vector no longer crashes when reducing the size of the vector.
1027  - Distinct types for boolean true and false have been added to the
1028    scrutinizer.
1029  - Fixed bugs in string-trim-right, string-index-right and
1030    string-skip-right, from SRFI-13
1031  - read-line no longer returns trailing CRs in rare cases on TCP ports (#568)
1032  - write and pp now correctly use escape sequences for control characters
1033     (thanks to Florian Zumbiehl)
1034  - posix: memory-mapped file support for Windows (thanks to "rivo")
1035  - posix: find-file's test argument now also accepts SRE forms.
1036  - numerator and denominator now accept inexact numbers, as per R5RS
1037    (reported by John Cowan).
1038  - Implicit $VAR- and ~-expansion in pathnames have been deprecated (#1001)
1039  - Fixed EINTR handling in process-wait and when reading from file ports.
1040  - Irregex is updated to 0.9.2, which includes bugfixes and faster submatches.
1041  - Compile-time expansions for "[sf]printf" are slightly more efficient.
1042  - Removed the deprecated "always?", "never?", "shuffle" and "none?" procedures.
1043  - Fixed problem "make-pathname" that returned an absolute path if given
1044    a relative one without a directory argument.
1045  - The implementation of promises has been made more efficient.
1046  - Removed the deprecated "c-runtime", "null-pointer?" and "pointer-offset"
1047    procedures.
1048  - The deprecated alias "mutate-procedure" for "mutate-procedure!" has
1049    been removed.
1050  - On 64-bit systems the feature identifier "64bit" is registered.
1051  - "process-fork" accepts an optional argument that specifies
1052    wether other threads should be terminated in the child process.
1053  - The "signal/bus" signal identifier was missing.
1054  - Added setter-procedure for "signal-mask".
1055  - Added "recursive-hash-max-length" and "recursive-hash-max-depth"
1056    parameters (srfi-69).
1057
1058- Platform support
1059  - CHICKEN can now be built on AIX (contributed by Erik Falor)
1060  - CHICKEN can now be built on GNU Hurd (contributed by Christian Kellermann)
1061  - Basic support has been added for building Android and iOS binaries (see
1062    the "README" file for caveats and pitfalls) (contributed by Felix Winkelmann
1063    from bevuta IT GmbH)
1064  - Added support for 64-bit Windows (consult the "README" file for more
1065    information).
1066
1067- Runtime system
1068  - finalizers on constants are ignored in compiled code because compiled
1069    constants are never GCed (before, the finalizer would be incorrectly
1070    invoked after the first GC).  (Reported by "Pluijzer")
1071  - The call trace buffer is now also resizable at runtime via ##sys#resize-trace-buffer.
1072  - C_zap_strings and ##sys#zap-strings (undocumented) have been deprecated.
1073  - Special events in poll() are now handled, avoiding hangs in threaded apps.
1074  - When invoking procedures with many rest arguments directly (not via APPLY),
1075    raise an error when argument count limit was reached instead of crashing.
1076  - When the maximum allowed heap size is reached, panic instead of crashing.
1077  - The code generated for mutating data destructively is partially inlined
1078    and thus slightly more efficient.
1079  - Fixed incorrect code in the foreign argument conversion for
1080    "unsigned-integer64" (#955).  For unsigned-integer, integer64 and
1081    unsigned-integer64, disallow floating-point numbers.  Fix behavior
1082    on 32-bit systems.
1083  - On systems that provide sigprocmask(2), segmentation violations, illegal
1084    instruction signals, bus errors and floating-point exceptions are now caught
1085    and trigger normal error-processing (including a backtrace). The handling
1086    of these so called "serious" signals can be disabled by passing the
1087    "-:S" runtime option to executables.
1088  - Reclamation of unused interned symbols (enabled with the "-:w" runtime option)
1089    works much better now.
1090
1091- Build system
1092  - The tests can now be run without having to first install CHICKEN.
1093  - Fixed a dependency problem that made it impossible to build the distribution
1094    tarball on Windows with the mingw compiler.
1095  - Increased the "binary compatibility version" to 7.
1096
1097- Tools
1098  - "csc"
1099    - "-z origin" is now passed as a linker option on FreeBSD when
1100      compiling for deployment (thanks to Jules Altfas & Vitaly Magerya)
1101    - "-deploy" works now on FreeBSD (thanks to Jules Altfas and
1102      Vitaly Magerya), OpenBSD and NetBSD (see README for NetBSD).
1103    - added "-oi"/"-ot" options as alternatives to "-emit-inline-file"
1104       and "-emit-type-file", respectively; "-n" has been deprecated.
1105    - .c/.o files are no longer overwritten when they have the same basename
1106      as a Scheme source file (i.e. "csc foo.scm foo.c -o foo" works now).
1107  - "chicken-install"
1108    - "-deploy" now correctly installs dependencies of
1109      deployed eggs under the deployment directory instead of globally.
1110    - Full URI syntax is now supported for proxy environment variables
1111      (thanks to Michele La Monaca)
1112  - "chicken-status"
1113    - Added -eggs command line option to list installed eggs
1114  - misc
1115    - Removed the deprecated "-v" options (use "-version" instead) in various
1116      core programs.
1117    - The runtime linker path for compiled executables was not set correctly
1118      on FreeBSD systems.  This has now been fixed.
1119    - Removed the deprecated "make" and "make/proc" facility from the
1120      "setup-api" module; also removed the deprecated "required-extension-version"
1121      and "required-chicken-version" procedures.
1122
1123- Syntax
1124  - Added the aliases "&optional" and "&rest" as alternatives to "#!optional"
1125    and "#!rest" in type-declarations (suggested by Joerg Wittenberger).
1126  - Vectors, SRFI-4 number vectors and blobs are now self-evaluating for
1127     R7RS compatibility.  Being literal constants, they are implicitly quoted.
1128  - For R7RS compatibility, named character literals #\escape and #\null are
1129     supported as aliases for #\esc and #\nul.  WRITE will output R7RS names.
1130  - The CASE form accepts => proc syntax, like COND (as specified by R7RS).
1131  - letrec* was added for R7RS compatibility.  Plain letrec no longer behaves
1132    like letrec*.
1133
1134- Compiler
1135  - the "inline" declaration does not force inlining anymore as recursive
1136    inlining could lead to non-termination of the compiler (thanks to
1137    Andrei Barbu).
1138  - Type-analysis ("scrutiny") is enabled by default now, unless
1139    "-optimize-level 0" or "-no-usual-integrations" is given.
1140  - The "-scrutinize" compiler option has been deprecated.
1141  - A new lightweight flow-analysis pass ("lfa2") has been added.
1142    Enable by passing the "-lfa2" option to the compiler.
1143  - The deprecated options "-disable-warning", "-heap-growth", "-heap-shrinkage"
1144    and "-heap-initial-size" have been removed.
1145  - Removed the deprecated "constant" declaration.
1146  - Removed the deprecated "-lambda-lift" and "-unboxing" compiler options.
1147  - Removed the deprecated "-V" compiler option.
1148  - Generated names for formal parameters of foreign functions are slightly
1149    more informative.
1150  - Unused references to variables that name intrinsics can be removed.
1151  - In the flow-analysis pass, matching of combinations of "list"/"list-of" and
1152    "or" types with has been made more reliable.
1153  - Fixed various bugs in the type database.
1154
1155- Syntax expander
1156  - added "require-extension-for-syntax" and "use-for-syntax".
1157  - Extended syntactic definitions are now available by default in all
1158    evaluated code, particularly in code evaluated at runtime in compiled
1159    applications.
1160  - Removed the deprecated variant "(define-compiler-syntax (NAME . LLIST) BODY ...)"
1161    of "define-compiler-syntax".
1162
1163- C API
1164  - Deprecated C_get_argument[_2] and C_get_environment_variable[_2] functions.
1165  - Removed the deprecated "__byte_vector" type.
1166
1167
11684.8.0
1169
1170- Security fixes
1171  - CVE-2012-6125: Improved hash table collision resistance and added
1172    randomization to prevent malicious external causes of collisions.
1173    All SRFI-69 procedures accept extra arguments to control randomization
1174    for testing/debugging.
1175  - CVE-2012-6124: On 64-bit machines the "random" procedure no longer
1176    truncates result values (which caused very nonrandom results for very
1177    large values). Note that random shouldn't be used for
1178    security-critical code.
1179  - CVE-2012-6123: Added checks for embedded '\0' characters in strings
1180    passed to some C functions on a lower level than CHICKEN's FFI.
1181
1182- Build system
1183  - version information has been moved into a separate unit to make the
1184    build-version shown in the banner and accessible through library
1185    procedures more accurate, this also speeds up the build on version-
1186    changes (thanks to Jim Ursetto for contributing this)
1187  - the build was made more reliable with respect to cross-compilation
1188    and custom installation names
1189  - the test-suite is now working on the mingw32 platform (with
1190    a few tests disabled due to missing functionality)
1191  - the version and branch of the sources are now properly compiled
1192    into the core libraries and shown in the "csi" and "chicken"
1193    version headers
1194  - The default target library name for an installation configured for cross-
1195    compilation is now "libchicken" and independent on any particular
1196    setting of PROGRAM_PREFIX/PROGRAM_SUFFIX (thanks to Otavio Salvador)
1197
1198- Compiler
1199  - Fixed bug in handling of symbols in constant-definitions (thanks to Peter
1200    Bex)
1201  - Stricter check for value-part of constant definition (thanks to Kon Lovett)
1202  - Fixed bug that caused argument-signatures of external definitions to be
1203    incorrectly modified during optimization (thanks to Peter Bex)
1204  - Failing constant-folding expressions now produce a compile-time warning
1205  - Fixed various bugs in the internal type-database (thanks to Kon Lovett and
1206    Peter Bex)
1207  - Fixed incorrect optimization rules for some fp-rounding and fixnum operators
1208  - added "-specialize" option and "specialize" declaration which enables
1209    optimizations of uses of core library procedures based on type-
1210    information gathered during flow analysis
1211  - "-optimize-level 3" and higher now implies "-specialize"
1212  - added option "-strict-types" and "-emit-type-file"
1213  - progress-information is now only shown with "-debug p"; the "-verbose"
1214    option only shows informational but noncritical messages
1215  - added optimizations for some library procedures
1216  - variable propagation for global variable accesses is now done in certain
1217    situations
1218  - the algorithmic complexity of the closure-conversion pass has been
1219    reduced which speeds up compilation noticably for large files
1220  - the "-uses" option handles whitespace in unit lists given on the
1221    command line (thanks to Santosh Rajan)
1222  - the alternative branch in a conditional is dropped when the condition
1223    is known to be a non-boolean value (suggested by Joerg Wittenberger)
1224  - implemented numerous fixes and improvements for flow analysis
1225  - fixed a bug in the compiler that could cause some variable bindings
1226    to be optimized away in certain situations involving inlining
1227  - added an experimental optimization called "clustering" (enable
1228    with the compiler option of the same name)
1229  - the optimizations done by the compiler are now listed as a comment
1230    in the generated C file
1231  - the type-information obtained during flow-analysis ("scrutiny") is
1232    now used for performing type-sensitive optimizations of calls to
1233    most of the core-library procedures
1234  - deprecated the "constant" declaration specifier
1235  - "unboxing" optimization has been completely removed - the implementation
1236    was unreliable and unmaintainable; the "-unboxing" compiler option will
1237    still be accepted but will produce a warning
1238  - Peter Bex contributed an optimization to the analysis pass that
1239    greatly reduces compile time for source code containing deeply nested
1240    lexical bindings
1241  - procedures that are known to have the value of a core library procedure
1242    that is a "standard" or "extended binding" will be inlined
1243  - enhanced line number tracking to get better error messages from
1244    the scrutinizer.
1245  - hygiene bugs related to compiler-syntax were fixed.
1246  - the local flow-analysis was sometimes reporting multiple warnings
1247    for the same type-conflict.
1248  - the time/space-complexity of some algorithms used in the compiler
1249    were reduced resulting in much better compile-times especially
1250    for large source files.
1251
1252- Interpreter
1253  - ",q" leaves the currently active REPL invocation instead of
1254    terminating the process (as suggested by John Cowan)
1255  - ",m" properly switches between modules (thanks to Christian Kellermann)
1256
1257- Core libraries
1258  - Cleaned up the set of available internal SRFI-feature-identifiers
1259  - Fixed bugs in "make-pathname" and "normalize-pathname" (thanks to Jim Ursetto)
1260  - The reader is now more consistent when parsing symbol- and keyword names
1261    that are fully or partially escaped (thanks to Kon Lovett)
1262  - The printer now does a better job at escaping certain single-character
1263    symbol names
1264  - Unit "lolevel"
1265    - deprecated "null-pointer" and "null-pointer?"
1266  - Fixed a bug in the Windows implementation of "file-type" (thanks to
1267    Jim Ursetto)
1268  - Fixed a bug in the implementation of "current-milliseconds" that could
1269    result in integer-overflow
1270  - Fixed an incorrect type-check in "list-ref" (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)
1271  - Disabled "-setup-mode" when compiling extensions for deployment (thanks
1272    to Ivan Raikov)
1273  - Got rid of some warnings in the C runtime system that were triggered on
1274    the SunPro C compiler (thanks to Joe Python)
1275  - Fixed bug in "string->number" that caused out-of-range characters to
1276    be accepted for base > 10 (thanks to Jim Ursetto)
1277  - added "foldl" and "foldr" procedures, which are more efficient and
1278    have a more consistent argument order than the corresponding
1279    SRFI-1 procedures
1280  - "shuffle" has been deprecated
1281  - added "queue-length"
1282  - "queue->list" allocates and returns a fresh list now
1283  - invoking a parameter-procedure with an argument will return the new
1284    value
1285  - added new procedure "quit"
1286  - port-procedures now check correctly for argument-ports being open
1287    (thanks to Peter Bex)
1288  - "repl" accepts an optional evaluator procedure (suggested by John
1289    Cowan)
1290  - added a setter procedure to "signal-handler" ("posix" unit)
1291  - EINTR is properly handled for input routines that may block
1292    waiting for input
1293  - the implementation of R5RS evaluation environments is now fully
1294    standards compliant
1295  - "file-exists?" and "directory-exists?" work now properly for files
1296    > 2GB (EOVERFLOW handling in stat(3) system call)
1297  - fixed bug in implementation of "fifo?"
1298  - the procedure returned by "condition-predicate" accepts any type
1299    of argument now
1300  - blobs have a readable textual representation ("#{...}")
1301  - "find-files" does not follow symlinks by default (as it did previously)
1302  - also, the old non-keyword argument signature for "find-files" is not
1303    supported anymore
1304  - added "alist-update" ("data-structures" unit)
1305  - "irregex-replace" returns the original string instead of #f when the
1306    regex does not match
1307  - irregex "real" built-in utility pattern now accepts a leading sign
1308  - added "change-directory*" ("posix" unit)
1309  - number parsing has been made more reliable and standards compliant
1310  - deprecated "none?", "always?" and "never?"
1311  - library procedures that take ports as arguments now all perform checks
1312    on port-direction and open/closed state
1313  - "mutate-procedure" has been renamed to "mutate-procedure!" - the old
1314    name is still available but deprecated
1315  - deprecated C_hash_string and C_hash_string_ci functions in the C API in
1316    favor of the more secure versions C_u_i_string_hash, C_u_i_string_ci_hash
1317  - a number of bugs in the irregex regular expression engine have been
1318    fixed; it has been updated to upstream release 0.8.3
1319  - "with-input-from-file", "with-output-to-file", "with-input-from-pipe" and
1320    "with-output-to-pipe" now properly restore the standard input/output
1321    ports in case the body thunk escapes
1322  - symbols with a single-char print-name where not always properly escaped
1323    when printed readably
1324  - the "make" facility of the "setup-api" module has been deprecated,
1325    please use the "make" extension when your egg requires this during
1326    setup.
1327
1328- Core tools
1329  - "csc"
1330    - The environment-variables "CHICKEN_C_INCLUDE_PATH" and
1331      "CHICKEN_C_LIBRARY_PATH" can now be used to add default include-
1332      and link-directories to C-compiler invocations
1333    - "-O5" passed expensive optimization flags to the C compiler which
1334      could expose C-Compiler bugs, depending on the compiler version
1335      (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf for pointing this out).
1336    - "-rpath" is ignored on OS X (thanks to Kon Lovett).
1337    - Fixed handling of "-output-file" (it was being ignored)
1338  - "chicken-install"
1339    - Added option "-override", which allows retrieving extension-
1340      versions from a file - this may be useful to ensure specific
1341      versions of a complete set of eggs are installed
1342    - Added option "-keep-installed"/"-x" that only installs explicitly
1343      named extensions given on the command line, if they are not
1344      already installed
1345    - Added option "-list" that lists all extensions available
1346    - Added option "-csi" to specify what interpreter should be used
1347      to execute the setup-script of an installed extension
1348    - Added option "-scan" that scans a local directory for the highest
1349      available extension versions available
1350    - Added option "-reinstall" that reinstalls all currently installed
1351      eggs, keeping their versions, if possible
1352    - Fixed bug with "chicken-install -test" when multiple extensions where
1353      given on the command line (thanks to Kon Lovett)
1354    - installing subdirectories works now on Windows.
1355    - fixed handling of "-force" when a "chicken" dependency version did
1356      not match
1357    - added new option "-show-foreign-depends" which lists foreign egg
1358      dependencies (if available)
1359    - added new option "-show-depends" which lists egg dependencies
1360    - added support for "or"-dependencies where a dependency is considered
1361      installed if one of a set of candidates is available
1362  - "chicken-profile"
1363    - fixed some bugs in the profiler and the runtime support code for
1364      profiling (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)
1365    - fixed broken percentage calculation (thanks to "megane")
1366  - "chicken-status"
1367    - Added option "-list" that dumps versions of installed extensions
1368      in a format suitable for "chicken-install -override ..."
1369    - the "pattern" argument is now actually treated as a pattern and not
1370      as a regex
1371
1372- Core syntax
1373  - "assert" shows the line number of the form when a second argument
1374    is not given or is a literal string
1375  - "parameterize" now correctly omits invoking the guard procedure when
1376    the old value is restored (thanks to Joo ChurlSoo)
1377  - added ":", "the" and "assume" syntax for declaring types
1378  - added "define-specialization" form to declare type-driven procedure
1379    call rewrites in compiled code
1380
1381- Syntax expander
1382  - Fixed a bug that caused imported identifiers to leak into the
1383    macroexpansion/compile-time environment (reported by Christian Kellermann)
1384  - Fixed a bug in the processing of extended lambda-lists (thanks to Peter Bex)
1385  - Peter Bex fixed a bug that caused bound variables to be incorrectly
1386    renamed in quoted literals (thanks to Matthew Flatt)
1387  - fixed devious bug in the invocation and generation of transformer
1388    procedures
1389  - using normal "lambda" forms as transformers for local or global
1390    syntax definitions is deprecated - one should use "syntax-rules",
1391    "er-macro-transformer" or "ir-macro-transformer" from now on
1392
1393- Runtime system
1394  - fixed handling of "inf" and nan" floating-point predicates for Solaris
1395    (thanks to Claude Marinier)
1396  - support for re-loading of compiled files has now been completely
1397    removed
1398  - the maximum length of strings is no longer limited to a 24-bit
1399    number on 64-bit architectures but can be 56 bits.
1400  - string-comparison handles embedded '\0' characters.
1401  - numerical predicates handle infinity and NaN correctly.
1402  - deprecated "[+-]nan", "[+-]inf" and other notations "accidentally"
1403    accepted by CHICKEN due to the underlying C library's strtod() function,
1404    standardizing on "[+-]nan.0" and "[+-]inf.0" from R6RS (and soon R7RS),
1405    when displaying numbers only these forms are generated now.
1406  - signals are queued to some extent and the interrupt handling has
1407    been cleaned up somewhat
1408  - the interpreter handles SIGINT directly - loading the "posix" unit
1409    is not needed anymore to handle this feature
1410  - changed default nursery size slightly and fixed a bug that caused
1411    incorrect (too small) nursery sizes on 64-bit platforms
1412  - deprecated the compiler option "-heap-initial-size", "-heap-growth"
1413    and "-heap-shrinkage"
1414  - the assembly-language stub routine for the implementation of "apply"
1415    was broken for Sparc64 systems and has been disabled for this platform
1416  - signal masks were accidentally reset upon GC for some platforms; use
1417    sigsetjmp/siglongjmp on BSD, Linux, MacOS X and Haiku
1418
1419- Type system
1420  - added new type-specifiers "input-port", "output-port", "(list-of T)"
1421    and "(vector-of T)"
1422  - the type-specifiers "(vector T ...)" and "(list T ...)" represent
1423    fixed size lists and vectors now
1424  - added qualified types ("forall"), optionally with type constrains
1425  - added the "define-type" special form and type-abbreviations
1426  - added "compiler-typecase", a compile-time typematching form
1427
1428- Module system
1429  - Added "interfaces", which are named groups of exports
1430  - Added "functors", which are parameterized modules
1431  - Modules can now be aliased
1432  - New syntax:
1433    (define-interface NAME EXPORTS)
1434    (functor (NAME ...) EXPORTS ...)
1435  - Extended syntax of "module" for aliasing and functor-instantiation
1436  - the "scheme" module has been integrated into the core library and
1437    is not installed as a separate import library anymore
1438  - added core module "r4rs" containing only bindings for R4RS identifiers
1439  - added core module alias "r5rs" for "scheme" module
1440  - added "module-environment" which returns an evaluation environment
1441    for the bindings of a module
1442  - fixed bugs related to using "export"/"reexport" in combination with
1443    wildcard ("*") module export lists (thanks to "megane")
1444
1445- Foreign function interface
1446  - locatives are allowed as arguments declared "c-pointer"
1447  - "int32" was not properly detected as a valid foreign type (thanks
1448    to Jim Ursetto)
1449
1450
14514.7.0
1452
1453- Build system
1454  - On BSD, libchicken.so is linked with -lpthread, as this seems
1455    to be required for linking libraries that require pthreads
1456  - The C header-files are now installed in a subdirectory below
1457    the "PRFIX/include" directory to allow installation of multiple
1458    chickens with different PROGRAM_PREFIX/PROGRAM_SUFFIX settings
1459    in the same prefix; to avoid conflicts with existing CHICKEN
1460    headers, it is recommended to completely remove any old
1461    installation before installing the new version
1462  - the PROGRAM_PREFIX and PROGRAM_SUFFIX configuration settings
1463    are applied to generated files and directories which allows
1464    perform differently named installations into the same PREFIX
1465  - increaded binary-compatibility version from 5 to 6, which
1466    means installed extensions in an existing installations will
1467    have to be re-installed
1468  - bugfixes in mingw/msys makefiles
1469  - Sven Hartrumpf contributed a bugfix to the internal helper
1470    script for creating distribution directories
1471  - Peter Bex has cleaned up the makefiles heavily, making the
1472    build more maintainable and easier to modify; thanks to all
1473    who helped testing this new build
1474  - renamed the makefile to `GNUmakefile' to catch using the
1475    a make(3) other than GNU make
1476  - configuration-header fix for BSD systems (thanks to Peter Bex
1477    and Christian Kellermann)
1478
1479
1480- Core libraries
1481  - the `regex' library unit has been removed and is separately
1482    available as an extension which should be fully backwards-
1483    compatible
1484  - `irregex' is now a core library unit and replaces the  `regex' API
1485  - "extras" unit
1486    - fixed pretty-printer output of certain escaped character
1487      sequences inside strings (thanks to Mario Domenech Goulart,
1488      thanks to Kon Lovett for pointing out a missing test-file)
1489    - The pretty printer did not escape some control characters correctly
1490      (reported by Alan Post)
1491    - control-characters in symbol-names are now properly escaped if
1492     the symbol is printed readably (thanks to Alaric Snell-Pym
1493     for pointing this out)
1494    - the deprecated `random-seed' function has been removed
1495  - "files" unit
1496    - fixed bug in `normalize-pathname'
1497    - `file-copy' and `file-move' check whether the source-file is a
1498      directory
1499    - `delete-directory' now optionally deletes directories recursively
1500  - "irregex" unit
1501    - Peter Bex has contributed various bugfixes and performance
1502      enhancements
1503  - "library" unit
1504    - Added "condition->list" (thanks to Christian Kellermann)
1505    - The reader accepts now escaped octal character codes in string
1506      literals
1507    - Read-syntax can return zero values to indicate ignored objects
1508    - R5RS output output routines now always return a "void" result
1509    - "\|" was not correctly escaped when occurring inside
1510      symbol print names
1511    - added `condition->list', contributed by Christian Kellermann
1512    - added `equal=?'
1513    - removed deprecated `getenv', `left-section', `right-section',
1514      `project', `c-runtime' and `noop'
1515    - added missing import-library entry for `vector-copy!' (thanks
1516      to Jules Altfas)
1517    - circular or excessively deeply nested data generates a more
1518      useful error message when encountered by `equal?'
1519    - `list-tail' gives now a better error message when passed a
1520      non-list argument
1521    - fixed bug in `getter-with-setter' that modified the first
1522      argument if it already had a setter procedure attached
1523    - fixed incorrect size of internal data vector used in `time'
1524      (thanks to Kon Lovett)
1525  - "lolevel" unit
1526    - removed deprecated `global-bound?', `global-make-unbound',
1527      `global-ref' and `global-set!' procedures
1528    - added support for `pointer-vectors':
1529      -  make-pointer-vector
1530      -  pointer-vector?
1531      -  pointer-vector-length
1532      -  pointer-vector-ref
1533      -  pointer-vector-set!
1534  - "posix" unit
1535    - "close-input-pipe" did not return the status code of a
1536      terminated process on Windows (reported by Mario Domenech Goulart)
1537    - added `file-creation-mode' (suggested by Mario Domenech Goulart)
1538  - "setup-api" unit
1539    - `required-extension-version' and `required-chicken-version' have
1540       been deprecated
1541  - "srfi-18" unit
1542    - removed deprecated `milliseconds->time' and `time->milliseconds'
1543      procedures
1544    - `make-mutex' incorrectly created mutexes as initially owned by
1545      the current threads (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger)
1546    - the file-descriptor handling in the scheduler has been simplified
1547      and performs some sanity checks
1548    - deadlock in the scheduler now terminates the process instead of
1549      attempting to throw an error
1550    - added some sanity checks to the scheduler
1551  - "tcp" unit
1552    - Fixed bug in "tcp-abandon-port" (reported by Jim Ursetto)
1553  - "utils" unit
1554    - `compile-file' now returns `#f' when the compilation fails,
1555       instead of raising an error
1556
1557
1558- Compiler
1559  - Removed unreliable lambda-lifting optimization (now, really!);
1560    the "-lambda-lift" option is still accepted but produces a
1561    warning
1562  - When "-scrutinize" is given, installed ".types" files will be
1563    automatically consulted for extensions and used units
1564  - Fixed optimizer bug in handling of "let" forms with multiple
1565    bindings which could result in toplevel assignments being
1566    silently dropped (reported by Moritz Heidkamp)
1567  - the `-accumulate-profile' option did not provide a way to
1568    specify the target profile data file - now `-profile-name'
1569    must always be given when accumulated profiling is done
1570    (thanks to Taylor Venable)
1571  - added `-module' option, which wraps the code into an implicit
1572    module
1573  - removed check for unsafe toplevel calls in safe mode
1574  - intrinsic handling of `exact->inexact' and `string->number' is
1575    now more efficient
1576  - fixed bug in leaf-routine optimization (thanks to David
1577    Dreisigmeyer)
1578  - unit-toplevel entry-points are now named differently, which
1579    may break binary-compatibility with existing compiled Scheme
1580    code modules
1581  - fixed invalid dropping of unused external entry-points in
1582    block-mode
1583  - fixed incorrect lambda-list check in scrutinizer (thanks to
1584    Alan Post)
1585  - Kon Lovett reported numerous bugs in the type-database used
1586    by the scrutinizer
1587  - `-fwrapv' is disabled on OpenBSD, since the default compiler
1588     does not support this option (thanks to Christian Kellermann)
1589  - on Solaris `gcc' is used by default, override `C_COMPILER'
1590    to use the Sun compiler instead
1591  - declaring a function `notinline' will prevent direct-call
1592    optimization for known procedure calls
1593  - the implementation of overflow-detection for arithmetic operations
1594    on fixnums have been replaced and now allow using the full 63-bit
1595    range of fixnums on 64-bit systems
1596  - fixed serious inlining-bug (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)
1597  - constant-folding in the compiler has been simplified and
1598    is more reliable (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)
1599  - optimization-levels 3 and higher imply `-unboxing -inline-global'
1600  - added new declaration `unsafe-specialized-arithmetic' which allows
1601    optimizing unboxed floating-point arithmetic in safe mode
1602  - removed `scrutinize' declaration
1603  - the warning shown when unimported identifiers are used in compiled
1604    modules now also shows the name of the procedure where the
1605    identifier is referenced (suggested by Alaric Snell-Pym)
1606
1607
1608- Documentation
1609  - Added list of installed files to README
1610  - Documented remaining "c...r" standard procedures (thanks to
1611    Juergen Lorenz)
1612  - The manual is now installed in HTML format in
1613    PREFIX/share/chicken/doc, many thanks to Jim Ursetto for
1614    contributing is excellent `manual-labor' extension which made
1615    this possible
1616
1617
1618- Foreign function interface
1619  - Added support for missing "(const [XXX-]c-string)" foreign type
1620    (thanks to Moritz Heidkamp)
1621  - removed deprecated `pointer', `nonnull-pointer', `byte-vector'
1622    and `nonnull-byte-vector' types
1623  - added missing result-type handling for `unsigned-integer64'
1624    (thanks to Moritz Heidkamp)
1625  - added `foreign-type-size' macro
1626  - added the new foreign type `size_t' (suggested by Moritz
1627    Heidkamp)
1628  - added the missing `unsigned-integer64' foreign type (thanks
1629    to Moritz for catching this)
1630  - added new foreign type `pointer-vector' which maps to `void **'
1631    and provided a low-level API in the `lolevel' library unit for
1632    manipulating pointer vectors
1633
1634
1635- Runtime system
1636  - Fixed typo in "runtime.c" (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)
1637  - Little-endian detection on MIPS systems was not correct (thanks
1638    to Christian Kellermann)
1639  - Fixed bug in handling of runtime-options with arguments (also
1640    reported by Christian Kellermann)
1641  - `equal?' does not compare procedures recursively anymore
1642  - fixed incorrect use of alloca.h on OpenBSD (thanks to
1643    Christian Kellermann and Alan Post)
1644  - checks for NaN and infinity are now done using ISO C99
1645    operations, which required various changes to `chicken.h'
1646    to make the code compile in ISO C99 mode
1647  - remaining debris regarding MSVC builds has been removed
1648  - fixed bug in argument-type check for 64-bit integer (thanks
1649    to Kon Lovett)
1650  - increased default trace-buffer size from 10 to 16
1651  - fixed bug in low-level termination routine (thanks to
1652    Jeronimo Pellegrini)
1653  - the scheduler handles violations of internal invariants
1654    regarding threads slightly more gracefully (thanks to Jim
1655    Ursetto)
1656  - fixed broken sleep-time conversion (thanks to Karel Miklav)
1657  - repaired broken handling of multiple finalizers that referred
1658    to the same object (reported by Moritz Heidkamp)
1659  - fixed problem with reader and escaping of single-char symbols
1660
1661
1662- Syntax expander
1663  - For-syntax syntax definitions where not correctly retained inside
1664    modules
1665  - Peter Bex fixed various critical bugs in the expander
1666  - The simplification for quasiquote expressions was unable
1667    to handle certain circular data (reported by Moritz Heidkamp)
1668  - `syntax-rules' now supports tail-patterns and is now fully
1669    SRFI-46 compatible - many thanks to Peter Bex for implementing
1670    this
1671  - Peter Bex provided a bugfix for resolution of primitive imports
1672  - handling of internal definitions with shadowed defining
1673    forms is now done correctly - fix once again from Peter Bex
1674  - corrected non-standard behaviour of quasiquote with respect
1675    to nested quasiquotations - another bugfix by our mighty macro
1676    master
1677  - removed stub-implementation of `define-macro'
1678  - handled case where a global redefinition of `cons' influenced
1679    a non-inlined internal use in the expander (thanks to David
1680    Steiner)
1681  - `define-record' now allows defining SRFI-17 setter procedures
1682    for accessing slots
1683  - the expansion of DSSSL lambda-lists uses now `let-optionals*'
1684    internally instead of `let-optionals' and so allows
1685    back-references to earlier formal variables; this also results in
1686    faster and more compact code for argument-list destructuring
1687    (thanks to Alan Post)
1688  - new "implicit renaming" macro facility contributed by Peter Bex
1689    (see `ir-macro-transformer')
1690  - parameters are now settable and can be modified using `set!'
1691    (SRFI-17)
1692  - added a SRFI-17 setter to `list-ref'
1693  - added literal blob syntax ("#{ ... }")
1694
1695
1696- Tools
1697  - chicken-install
1698    - option "-deploy" does not compile deployed extensions with
1699      "-setup-mode" anymore to avoid problems with dynamic loading on
1700      some platforms (specifically Mac OS X)
1701    - option "-deploy" option did not copy the correct library
1702      (including the version-number) (thanks to Christian Kellermann)
1703    - added support for proxy-authentification (thanks to Iruata Souza)
1704    - when installing from a local directory `chicken-install' now
1705      removes existing `*.so' files in that location to avoid stale
1706      binaries when the `make' syntax is used in setup scripts
1707  - chicken-bug
1708    - removed disabled e-mail support
1709  - csc
1710    - removed `-static-extension' option
1711    - removed deprecated `-windows' option
1712    - fixed incorrect use of `chicken.rc' on non-Windows platforms
1713      in `-gui' mode (thanks to "ddp")
1714    - when compiling in C++ mode, the compiler will be called with the
1715      `-Wno-write-strings' option
1716    - `-frwapv' has been added to the default C compiler options
1717  - csi
1718    - the ",m" toplevel command now accepts "#f" to switch back to
1719      the initial empty module context (suggested by Christian Kellermann)
1720    - fixed broken `,g' toplevel command
1721    - deprecated `script' feature identifier (use `chicken-script'
1722      instead)
1723    - options `-p' and `-P' and `-e' imply `-no-init'
1724    - the call-trace reported will not include exception-handler code
1725      anymore (suggested by Christian Kellermann)
1726
1727
1728
17294.6.0
1730
1731- the licenses used in all components of the core system have
1732  been collected in the LICENSE file (Thanks to Peter Bex)
1733- Added new compiler option `-no-module-registration' which
1734  omits generation of module registration code, even when
1735  generation of import libraries has not been enabled
1736- running `chicken' without arguments now hints at the
1737  existence of `csi' and `csc'
1738- `caar', `cdar' and `cddr' generate faster code
1739- calls to `list', `vector' and the internal structure
1740  allocation primitive that take 1 to 8 arguments generate
1741  faster code
1742- `chicken-install' now checks the version of the setup
1743  configuration file `setup.defaults'
1744- added option `-exact' to `chicken-status' and `chicken-uninstall',
1745  which treats the pattern argument as the literal name of the
1746  extension to be listed/deinstalled
1747- `assert' shows line-number information, if available
1748  (suggested by Alejandro Forero Cuervo)
1749- interpreted code records the lexical-environment at call-
1750  sites, which can in case of an error be inspected with the
1751  new `,c', `,f' and `,g' csi toplevel commands
1752- the evaluation-result history in `csi' can be inspected and
1753  cleared (to reduce memory load) with the toplevel commands
1754  `,h' and `,ch'
1755- unit `data-structures': deprecated `left-section' and
1756  `right-section'
1757- fixed bug that caused the static syntax-environment of
1758  syntax exported by a module to be incomplete
1759- module `setup-api': Documented the `version>=?' and
1760  `extension-name-and-version' proceedures
1761- unit `posix': `utc-time->seconds' is considerably
1762  faster on Mac OS X (thanks to Jim Ursetto);
1763  added new procedure `file-type'
1764- the `time' macro now shows the correct number of minor
1765  garbage collections
1766- the immediate-object check inside the marking procedure
1767  of the garbage collector has been manually inlined which
1768  results in a significant GC speedup, depending on memory
1769  load
1770- unit `srfi-18' and `scheduler': various bugfixes (thanks
1771  to Joerg Wittenberger)
1772- unit `srfi-4': bugfix in 8-bit vector allocation routines
1773  (thanks to Kon Lovett)
1774- added `-:H' runtime option to dump heap state on exit
1775- fixed missing change in Makefile.cygwin (thanks to John Cowan)
1776- fixed bug in `let-optionals' macro that caused problems when the
1777  rest-variable was actually named `rest' (thanks to Alejandro
1778  Forero Cuervo)
1779- when Scheme files are translated to C++ or Objective-C, `csc'
1780  will register the feature-identifiers `chicken-scheme-to-c++'/
1781  `chicken-scheme-to-objc' ar compile-time
1782- fixed bug in expansion of `#!key' parameters in lambda-lists
1783- debug-output for forcing finalizers on exit goes to stderr now
1784  (thanks to Joerg Wittenberger)
1785- the installation routines for extensions automatically add
1786  version-number information if none is given in the extension
1787  property list (suggested by Alejandro Forero Cuervo)
1788- `standard-extension' accepts `#f' now for the version number
1789  and will use the version that has been obtained via
1790  `chicken-install'
1791- `fifo?', `symbolic-link?', `directory?', `regular-file?', `socket?',
1792  `character-device?' and `block-device?' now accepts file-descriptors
1793  or filenames
1794- `find-files' takes keyword arguments, now (including the options
1795  to process dotfiles and ignore symbolic links); the old argument
1796  signature is still supported but deprecated
1797- removed dependency on `symbol-append' in some macros used in
1798  srfi-4.scm to be able to compile the system with older chickens
1799- fixed bug in script that generates development snapshot
1800- added build-variable `TARGET_FEATURES', which can be used to pass
1801  extra options enabling or disabling fetures for a system configured
1802  for cross-compilation
1803- added compiler and interpreter option `-no-feature FEATURENAME' that
1804  disables predefined feature identifiers
1805- code compiled with interrupts disabled will not emit inline files
1806  for global inlining since they may execute in a context where
1807  interrupts are enabled
1808- the `setup.defaults' file that holds download sources for
1809  `chicken-install' now allows aliases for locations
1810- CHICKEN systems build from cross-compilation now by default
1811  transparently build and install extensions for both the host
1812  and target parts of the cross-compilation setup; the options
1813  `-host' and `-target' can now be used to selectively build
1814  an extensions for the host- and the target system, respectively
1815- also added `-host' and `-target' options to `chicken-status' and
1816  `chicken-uninstall'
1817- `chicken-install' now respects the `http_proxy' environment variable
1818  (contributed by Stephen Eilert)
1819- the `srfi-4' library unit has been heavily cleaned up and optimized
1820- optimization-level 3 now enables global inlining
1821- fixed the case that declarations listing global identifiers did not
1822  correctly rename them
1823- deprecated `-N' option shortcut for `-no-usual-integrations' option in
1824  `csc'
1825- `csi' now offers a toplevel command `,e' for invoking an external
1826  editor (suggested by Oivind Binde)
1827- the `describe' command in `csi' now detects many circular lists
1828  (contributed by Christian Kellermann)
1829- `csi' doesn't depend on the `srfi-69' library unit anymore
1830- when a closing sequence delimiter is missing or incorrect, the
1831  reader also reports the starting line of the sequence
1832- the reader signals an error when a file contains certain characters
1833  that indicate that it is a binary file
1834- procedure-information shown by the printer for procedures is now
1835  corrected for some library procedures that where missing the correct
1836  information; `getter-with-setter' copies procedure-information objects
1837  into the newly created accessor procedure, if available
1838- calls to some known pure standard- or extended procedures are removed, if
1839  the procedures are called with side-effect free arguments and the
1840  result is not used (this can also by enabled for user procedures with
1841  the `constant' declaration)
1842- fixed some build-system bugs related to installation
1843- fixed a problem in the C runtime code that prevented it to be compileable
1844  without a configuration header-file
1845- the makefile-target to build a bootstrapping `chicken' executable
1846  performs multi-stage build now
1847- changed error message when required extension is out of date (thanks to
1848  Mario Goulart)
1849- documented library units loaded by default in `csi' (thanks to Moritz
1850  Heidkamp)
1851- added `boot-chicken' makefile target to simplify bootstrapping
1852  the system from sources and documented this in the README
1853  (suggested by Jim Ursetto)
1854- CHICKEN can now be built on haiku (contributed by Chris Roberts)
1855- on Solaris, the system can be compiled with the SunPro C compiler
1856  (thanks to Semih Cemiloglu)
1857- removed the `-disable-warnings' compiler option and `disable-warnings'
1858  declaration specifier
1859- `fx/' and `fxmod' generate now faster code in safe mode
1860- cleaned up manual pages
1861- slightly optimized variable- and procedure-access
1862- in the compiler `-debug-level 2' implies `-scrutinize'
1863- internal compiler-transformation for `for-each' and `map'
1864  apply now with any expression as the procedure argument
1865- the compiler warns about non-intrinsic exported toplevel variables
1866  which are declared to be safe
1867- `csc' didn't handle the `-verbose' option (thanks to Mario Goulart)
1868- the `,d' command in `csi' now detects circular lists (thanks to
1869  Christian Kellermann)
1870- strings passed to C runtime functions and which are converted to
1871  0-terminated C strings are now checked for not containing embedded
1872  `\0' characters (thanks to Peter Bex)
1873- errors in user-defined record printers are caught and shown in the
1874  output instead of throwing an error to avoid endless recursion when
1875  an error message is printed
1876- a feature identifier named `chicken-MAJOR.MINOR' is now defined
1877  to simplify conditionalization of code on the CHICKEN version
1878- `getter-with-setter' copies the lambda-information (if available) from
1879  the getter to the generated procedure
1880- `time' uses a somewhat more concise output format and outputs timing
1881  information to stderr instead of stdout
1882- added a new chapter on cross-development to the manual
1883- added the `safe-globals' declaration specifier
1884- split up manual chapter `Modules and macros' into two chapters
1885  (named `Modules' and `Macros', respectively - suggested by
1886  Mario Goulart)
1887- the last 5 non-precompiled regular expressions are now internally
1888  cached in compiled form, which speeds up repeated matching of
1889  the same uncompiled regular expression dramatically
1890- added the new procedure `yes-or-no?' to the `utils' library unit
1891- added a `bench' makefile target that runs some non-trivial
1892  benchmark programs
1893- added `install-target' and `install-dev' makefile target for
1894  installing only target system libraries in cross-mode and
1895  development files (static libraries and headers)
1896- added `[-]no-procedure-checks-for-toplevel-bindings' compiler
1897  option and declaration
1898- usage of unimported syntax in modules gives more usable
1899  error messages; in particular, used but unimported FFI forms are
1900  now detected
1901- invalid syntactic forms (mostly `()') encountered by the compiler
1902  or interpreter show the contextual form containing the expression,
1903  or, if indicated by the context warns about missing imports
1904- simplified manual pages of all core tools - they now refer to
1905  the output shown by invoking `<tool> -help'
1906- added new option `-feature FEATURE' to `chicken-install' tool
1907  to pass feature-identifiers to invocations of `csc'
1908- removed deprecated `-host-extension' option from `chicken-install'
1909- `chicken-status' in a system built for cross-compilation now
1910  lists extensions installed in the target prefix, unless the
1911  new `-host' option is given on the command line
1912- `chicken-uninstall' in a system built for cross-compilation now
1913  removes extensions installed in the target prefix, unless the
1914  new `-host' option is given on the command line
1915- added missing entry for `finite?' to the `chicken' module
1916  exports
1917- added new procedure `port-closed?' to the `library' unit
1918  (contributed by Peter Bex)
1919- added new procedure `symbol-append' to the library unit
1920- the compiler-option `-optimize-level 0' is equivalent to
1921  `-no-compiler-syntax -no-usual-integrations`
1922- internal rewritings of `map' and `for-each' ensure correct
1923  evaluation order of the arguments and does a better job
1924  at detecting non-list arguments (thanks to Jim Ursetto)
1925- `void' now takes arbitrary arguments and ignores them
1926- deprecated `noop' (from the `data-structures' unit) which
1927  is now replaced by `void'
1928- the `time' macro now performs a major garbage collection
1929  before executing the contained expressions and writes
1930  the timings in a more compact format to the port given
1931  by `(current-error-port)' instead of the standard output
1932  port
1933- definitions of the form `(define define ...)' and
1934  `(define-syntax define-syntax ...)' now trigger an error,
1935  as required by R5RS (thanks to Jeronimo Pellegrini and Alex
1936  Shinn)
1937- deprecated `random-seed' from the `extras' unit, since it
1938  is identical to `randomize'
1939- added new procedure `create-temporary-directory' to the
1940  `files' unit
1941- deprecated the optional path separator argument to
1942  `make-pathname'
1943- slightly improved the performance of keyword argument
1944  processing
1945- removed the deprecated `canonical-path' and `current-environment'
1946  procedures from the `posix' unit
1947- warnings that mostly refer to programming style issues are
1948  now coined `notes' and are only shown in the interpreter
1949  or when debug-mode is enabled or when scrutiny is enabled
1950  when compiling
1951
19524.5.0
1953
1954- internal fixes of handling of alternative installation-prefix
1955  in setup-api
1956- certain compiler-warnings that are in really just notes
1957  and don't indicate a possible error (like reimport of
1958  identifiers) are only shown with -S or in verbose mode
1959- fixed handling of VARDIR in `chicken-install' (thanks to
1960  Davide Puricelli)
1961- `chicken-install -test' doesn't runs tests for dependencies
1962- when a non-else clause follows an else-clause in `cond',
1963  `case' or `select' a warning (note) is shown in verbose
1964  mode
1965- removed the deprecated `define-extension' and
1966  `define-compiled-syntax'
1967- `chicken-uninstall' now always asks before removing
1968  extensions, unless `-force' is given
1969- improved performance of keyword-argument processing slightly
1970- `export' outside of a module definition has no effect
1971- `number->string' now accepts arbitrary bases between 2 and 16
1972  (thanks to Christian Kellermann)
1973- fixed `standard-extension' in `setup-api' module
1974- literal constants keep their identity, even when inlined
1975- Unit library: added `fxodd?' and `fxeven?'
1976- All hardcoded special forms have been replaced with
1977  syntax definitions that expand into internal forms, this
1978  allows redefinition and shadowing of all Scheme core forms
1979- faster implementations of `get' and `put!'
1980- faster implementation of `assq' in unsafe mode
1981- the `-sx' option prefixes each output line with `;'
1982- slightly better expansion performance
1983- more documentation of the C API (thanks to Peter Bex)
1984- `module' supports a shorthand form that refers directly
1985  to a file to be included as the module body
1986- added runtime option `-:G' to force GUI mode (on platforms
1987  that distinguish between GUI and non-GUI applications)
1988- removed the unsafe runtime library (`libuchicken'), this
1989  simplifies and speeds up the build and reduces the risk
1990  of executables loading library units from different
1991  variants of the runtime system
1992- removed the `-unsafe-libraries' option from `chicken'
1993  and `csc'
1994- removed bootstrapping target and bootstrapping files from
1995  development repository; to bootstrap the system, either
1996  use a release or development-snapshot tarball or fetch
1997  a statically linked precompiled `chicken' binary from
1998  http://chicken.wiki.br/chicken-projects/bootstrap/
1999- Jim Ursetto provided some fixes for building universal
2000  binaries on Mac OS X
2001- `csc' now compiles and links Windows resource (.rc) files
2002  when given on the command line
2003- `chicken-install' and `chicken-uninstall' have an embedded
2004  manifest that suppresses the elevation dialog on Windows
2005  Vista and later when UAC is activated (Thanks to Thomas Chust)
2006- the `install' program is not used in the build on mingw
2007  and mingw/MSYS platforms, since this is broken on older
2008  mingw versions
2009- line-number-information is now properly handled (in the
2010  few places where it is used) correctly for included files;
2011  the source file is given in trace-output in addition to
2012  the line number
2013- removed compiler warning for shared objects compiled in
2014  unsafe mode
2015- unboxing is now only done in unsafe mode
2016- in unsafe mode, pointer-accessors from the `lolevel' unit
2017  are now handled intrinsically by the compiler
2018- `chicken-install' accepts now relative pathnames for the
2019  `-prefix' option
2020- `define-record-type' now optionally allows using SRFI-17
2021  setters as record-field modifiers
2022- `integer?' returns `#f' for NaN and infinite numbers
2023- `csc' now has an `-no-elevation' option for embedding a
2024  manifest that prevents the elevation dialog on Windows
2025  Vista and later when IAC is activated
2026- the `,d' csi command displays qualified symbols properly
2027- symbols starting with the `#\#' character trigger an
2028  error when encountered by the reader
2029- Unit posix: `glob->regexp' now always returns a regular
2030  expression object or optionally an SRE
2031- Unit posix: `terminal-port?' and `terminal-size' have been
2032   implemented for Windows, the latter always returns `0 0',
2033  though (thanks to Jim Ursetto)
2034- Unit regex: `regexp' now accepts a regular expression
2035  object as argument
2036- Unit regex: removed `glob?'
2037- fixed bug in `chicken-install'/`chicken-uninstall' and
2038  `chicken-status' that prevented collapsed command-line
2039  options to be handled correctly.
2040- disabled runpath-fix for deployed applications for netbsd
2041  (but resurrected providing a runpath at all, thanks to
2042  Peter Bex)
2043- Peter Bex provided documentation for the `C_closure' C API
2044  function
2045
20464.4.0
2047
2048- the system can now be built with llvm-gcc and/or "clang" (the
2049  LLVM C compiler which doesn't use the GNU C frontend)
2050- added new option `-trunk' to `chicken-install', which forces
2051  building and installing the development version of extensions
2052  in combination with `-t local'
2053- added new option `-deploy' to `chicken-install', which builds
2054  extension for use in "deployed" applications (see below)
2055- added option `-deploy' to `csc', the compiler driver. With this
2056  option `csc' can build fully self-contained application bundles
2057  and double-clickable Macintosh GUI apps; see the "Deployment"
2058  manual chapter for more information
2059- the directory given to the `-prefix' option of `chicken-install'
2060  may now be a relative pathname.
2061- removed GUI-specific runtime library (`libchicken-gui') from
2062  Windows build - GUI- and non-GUI applications now use the same
2063  runtime library
2064- special forms of the foreign-function interface have been replaced
2065  with an internal form and syntax to allow renaming and shadowing of
2066  these forms
2067- the new `-private-repository' option in `csc' compiles executables
2068  with the extension-repository path set to the directory from which
2069  the program was started
2070- `csc': deprecated the `-W' and `-windows' options, added `-gui' as
2071  a platform-independent replacement
2072- `require-extension'/`use' accepts now import-specifications
2073- user-defined extension-specifiers and `set-extension-specifier!'
2074  have been removed
2075- `delete-file[*]', `rename-file', `create-directory', `file-copy',
2076  `file-move', `delete-directory' and `change-directory' return their
2077  argument/destination filename on success
2078- added the missing procedure `condition-variable-name' to the
2079  srfi-18 library unit (Thanks to Joerg Wittenberger)
2080- the `glob?' function from the `regex' unit has been deprecated
2081- added the procedure `scan-input-lines' to the `utils' library unit
2082- added new runtime option `-:g' which enables GC debugging output
2083- reclamation of unused symbols in "symbol-gc" mode (`-:w') now only
2084  takes place for symbols with an empty property-list
2085- on Windows loading of code compiled with [non-]GUI runtime libraries
2086  will fail and produce an error message when the loading executable
2087  is linked with a different runtime system
2088- on Windows, GUI libraries were not correctly linked by `csc'
2089- unit posix: added setter for `file-modification-time'
2090- the banner shows the branchname of the build, unless it's "master"
2091- the `-no-install' option to `chicken-install' is ignored when
2092  building/installing dependencies
2093- `chicken-uninstall' takes a glob instead of a regular expression as
2094  argument
2095- the rename and compare functions for low-level macro-definitions
2096  accept now arbitrary s-expressions and renames/compares them recursively
2097- `number->string' handles negative-numbers with bases different from 10
2098  correctly (thanks to Peter Danenberg)
2099- removed deprecated `setup-install-flag' and `setup-verbose-flag' from
2100  the `setup-api' module
2101- added new option `-repository' to `chicken-install' (Thanks to Christian
2102  Kellermann)
2103- removed `chicken-setup' stub program
2104- fix to `csc' to use the correct library when fixing dynamic load paths
2105  (Thanks to Derrell Piper)
2106- removed html documentation from distribution (the wiki manual will
2107  now be installed)
2108- fixed bug in `reexport' which caused syntax not to be correctly
2109  reexported
2110- previous assignments to a toplevel variable that are separated by
2111  side effect free expressions are removed
2112- fixed windows version of `find-files' (thanks to Jim Ursetto)
2113- documentation for extensions is not installed automatically by
2114  `chicken-install' anymore
2115- changed binary version from "4" to "5", because the new runtime
2116  libraries are not binary-compatible with previous releases; this
2117  means all eggs have to be reinstalled and existing programs be
2118  recompiled!
2119- added unboxing pass to compiler which results in partially dramatical
2120  performance improvements for unsafe floating-point-intensive code;
2121  unboxing is enabled on optimization levels 4 and 5
2122- removed rest-argument-vector optimization as it could conflict
2123  with inlining (thanks to Sven Hartrumpf)
2124- renamed `pointer-offset' to `pointer+' and deprecated `pointer-offset'
2125- toplevel assignments that have no other side-effects can be eliminated
2126  if it can be shown that the value is not used (the compiler will
2127  generate a warning in this case)
2128- removed deprecated `-quiet' option in `chicken' program
2129- removed deprecated `run-time-macros' declaration
2130- removed deprecated `-v2' and `-v3' options in `csc' program
2131- removed deprecated `list-of' function (it is exclusively available
2132  as `list-of?' now)
2133- removed deprecated `stat-...' functions in posix library unit
2134- removed deprecated `for-each-line' and `for-each-argv-line' procedures
2135  in utils library unit
2136- added `fpinteger?' and `fpabs'
2137- deprecated `define-compiled-syntax'
2138- added new floating-point primitives `fpsin', `fpcos', `fptan',
2139  `fpasin', `fpacos', `fpatan', `fpatan2', `fpexp', `fplog',
2140  `fpexpt' and `fpsqrt'
2141- heavy cleanup of floating math functions which gives much better performance,
2142  especially for code compiled in unsafe mode
2143- calling `assert' with a single argument shows the tested expression
2144  on failure
2145- various bugfixes and cleaning up
2146
21474.3.0
2148
2149- fixed bug in `move-memory!' that caused negative offsets to be accepted
2150  (thanks to Jim Ursetto)
2151- removed tracing facility and apply-hook (see the "trace" egg
2152  for a replacement for tracing and breakpoints)
2153- chicken-install(1): renamed `-host-extension' option to `-host'
2154- added support for a make(1) configuration file ("config.make")
2155- `chicken-install' now allows specifiying a proxy for retrieving
2156  extensions over HTTP (thanks to Nicolas Pelletier)
2157- fixed bug in `cond-expand' that incorrectly renamed feature-identifiers
2158  if the form was the product of a syntax expansion (reported by Thomas
2159  Bushnell)
2160- import-libraries are only generated by the compiler if they don't exist
2161  yet and if the content has actually changed (this simplifies makefile-
2162  rules in some cases)
2163- it is now possible to pass a config-file to `make(1)' instead of specifying
2164  all build-options as variables on the command-line (see README)
2165- removed compiler options for "benchmark-mode" and replaced them with a
2166  new optimization level (5) (note that `-O5' does not imply fixnum mode
2167  anymore)
2168- `hen.el' and `scheme-complete.el' are not bundled with the core system
2169  anymore - `hen.el' is currently not maintained, and `scheme-complete.el'
2170  has its own release cycle; both files are available, see
2171  http://chicken.wiki.br/emacs
2172- removed meaningless benchmark suite and cleaned up
2173- added optional argument to `grep' that allows applying a function
2174  to each matched item (contributed by Tony Sidaway)
2175- added extension-property `import-only', which makes it possible to
2176  create extensions that have no runtime part
2177- the argument to `seconds->string', `seconds->utc-time' and
2178  `seconds->local-time' is now optional and defaults to the value
2179  of `(current-seconds)' (suggested by Mario Goulart)
2180- removed read-syntax for `syntax' form
2181- fixed bug in `get-condition-property'
2182- fixed bug in windows version of `process-execute'
2183- TCP timeouts throw exception of kind `timeout' to allow
2184  distinguishing between timeouts and other errors
2185- removed some internal functions that manipulate environments
2186- fixed bugs in `standard-extension' (`setup-api' module) and added keyword
2187  arguments for building static extensions and adding custom properties
2188- when cross-compiling, `chicken-install(1)' doesn't pass `-setup-mode'
2189  (the host tools should not attempt to load target binaries)
2190- `installation-prefix' in the `setup-api' module was not always correctly
2191  set
2192- the `-force' option in `chicken-install(1)' overrides the CHICKEN version
2193  check
2194- disabled e-mail feature in `chicken-bug(1)', since it doesn't work
2195  anyway, in the moment
2196- fixed bug in `reexport' that made it impossible to reexport core library
2197  definitions
2198- fix in optimizer that sometimes caused C functions for inlined
2199  procedures to be emitted multiple times (Thanks to Joerg Wittenberger)
2200- documented `define-compiler-syntax' and `let-compiler-syntax'
2201- printer for hash-tables shows current number of stores items
2202- when upgrading during installation of a dependency `chicken-install'
2203  shows the version to upgrade to (Thanks to Christian Kellermann)
2204- Updated scheme-complete (Thanks to Alex Shinn)
2205- fix for pathnames with whitespace in 'runtests.sh' on Windows
2206- fix for 'normalize-pathname' with absolute pathname argument
2207- added 'decompose-directory' to unit files
2208- fix for 'local-timezone-abbreviation' - wasn't using the current time
2209  so tz-name constant
2210- deprecated 'make-pathname' separator argument
2211
22124.2.0
2213
2214- added compiler option `-emit-all-import-libraries'
2215- added `reexport'
2216- added compiler and interpreter option `-setup-mode'
2217- various minor performance improvements
2218- fix for 'create-directory' when parents wanted
2219- `for-each-line' and `for-each-argv-line' have been deprecated
2220- chicken-install tries alternative servers if server responds with error
2221- fixed load bug (ticket #72)
2222- new library procedure `get-condition-property'
2223- many mingw build fixes (thanks tp Fadi Moukayed)
2224- setup-api: deprecated `cross-chicken' (use `cond-expand' or
2225  `feature?' instead)
2226- added topological-sort to data-structures unit; chicken-install
2227  sorts dependencies before installing them
2228- "-optimize-level 2" enables inlining by default
2229- disable executable stack in assembly code modules (patch by
2230  Zbigniew, reported by Marijn Schouten)
2231- csc now always exits with a status code of 1 on errors (patch by Zbigniew)
2232
22334.1.0
2234
2235- The new parameter "parantheses-synonyms" and the command-line
2236  option "-no-parantheses-synonyms" allow disabling list-like behaviour
2237  of "{ ... }" and "[ ... ]" tokens
2238- The new parameter "symbol-escape" and the command-line
2239  option "-no-symbol-escape" allows disabling "| ... |" symbol escape
2240  syntax
2241- Added command-line option "-r5rs-syntax" to disable CHICKEN-specific
2242  read-syntax
2243- Removed "macro?" and "undefine-macro!"
2244- Support for Microsoft Visual Studio / MSVC has been dropped
2245- The compiler provides now a simple flow-analysis pass that does
2246  basic checking of argument-counts and -types for core library procedure
2247  calls (new option "-scrutinize")
2248- New compiler-options "-no-argc-checks", "-no-bound-checks",
2249  "-no-procedure checks", "-no-procedure-checks-for-usual-bindings",
2250  "-types TYPEFILE" and "-consult-inline-file FILENAME"
2251- Added a "chicken-setup" stub-application to catch incorrect use of
2252  this tool (which has been replaced in 4.0.0 with "chicken-install")
2253- Changed "setup-install-flag" and "setup-verbose-flag" to
2254  "setup-install-mode" and "setup-verbose-mode" in "setup-api" module,
2255  the old names are still available but deprecated
2256- Posix unit:
2257  added "socket?", "block-device?" and "character-device?", deprecated
2258  redundant "stat-..." procedures
2259- Added "directory-exists?"
2260- "(for-each (lambda ...) X)" is compiled as a loop
2261- The argument-count check for format-strings for "[sf]printf" with a constant
2262  string argument is done at compile-time
2263
22644.0.0
2265
2266- removed `apropos' and `apropos-list' from the "utils" library unit;
2267  available as an extension
2268- removed texinfo and PDF documentation - this will possible be added back
2269  later
2270- replaced PCRE regex engine with Alex Shinn's "irregex" regular expression
2271  package
2272- removed `-extension' option
2273- removed `-static-extensions' csc option and added `-static-extension NAME'
2274- `regex' unit: removed `regexp*' and `regex-optimize'
2275- added `CHICKEN_new_finalizable_gc_root()'
2276- `length' checks its argument for being cyclic
2277- removed custom declarations and "link-options" and "c-options" declarations
2278- deprecated "-quiet" option to "chicken" program
2279- added "-update-db" option to chicken-install
2280- the compiler now suggests possibly required module-imports
2281- moved non-standard syntax-definitions into "chicken-syntax" library unit
2282- the pretty-printer prints the end-of-file object readably now
2283- alternative conditional execution paths have separate allocation computation
2284  (previously the allocation of all alternatives was coalesced)
2285- removed unused "%kmp-search" from "srfi-13" library unit
2286- expander handles syntax-reexports and makes unexported syntax available
2287  for exported expanders in import libraries
2288- added checks in some procedures in the "tcp" library unit
2289- the macro system has been completely overhauled and converted
2290  to hygienic macros
2291- a macro-aware module system has been added
2292- added "-sx" option to csi
2293- removed the following deprecated functions:
2294   [un]shift!
2295   andmap ormap
2296   byte-vector? byte-vector-fill!
2297   make-byte-vector byte-vector
2298   byte-vector-set! byte-vector-ref
2299   byte-vector->list list->byte-vector
2300   string->byte-vector byte-vector->string
2301   byte-vector-length
2302   make-static-byte-vector static-byte-vector->pointer
2303   byte-vector-move! byte-vector-append!
2304   set-file-position! set-user-id! set-group-id!
2305   set-process-group-id!
2306   macro? undefine-macro!
2307- the situation-identifiers "run-time" and "compile-time" have
2308  been removed
2309- the compiler options "-check-imports", "-import" and "-emit-exports"
2310  have been removed
2311- new procedures:
2312  strip-syntax
2313  expand
2314- new macros
2315  define-syntax
2316  module
2317  export
2318- the following macros have been removed:
2319    define-foreign-record
2320    define-foreign-enum
2321    define-macro
2322    define-extension
2323- "local" mode, in which locally defined exported toplevel variables can
2324  be inlined
2325- new options and declarations "[-]local", "[-]inline-global" and "-emit-inline-file"
2326- optimization levels changed to use inlining:
2327  -optimize-level 3: enables -inline -local (but *not* -unsafe)
2328  -optimize-level 4: enables -inline -local -unsafe
2329- increased default inlining-limit to 20
2330- support for cross-module inlining
2331- "make <VARIABLES> bench" runs the benchmark suite
2332- "chicken-setup" has been replaced by new command line tools
2333  "chicken-install", "chicken-uninstall" and "chicken-status", which are
2334  more flexible and allow greater freedom when creating local or application-
2335  specific repositories
2336- extension-installation can be done directly from SVN repositories or a local
2337  file tree
2338- enabled chicken mirror site as alternative download location
Trap