Announcement of ECL
===================

ECL stands for Embeddable Common-Lisp. The ECL project aims to
produce an implementation of the Common-Lisp language which complies
to the ANSI X3J13 definition of the language.

The term embeddable refers to the fact that ECL includes a lisp to C
compiler, which produces libraries (static or dynamic) that can be
called from C programs. Furthermore, ECL can produce standalone
executables from your lisp code and can itself be linked to your
programs as a shared library.

ECL supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
Solaris (at least v. 9), Microsoft Windows and OSX, running on top of
the Intel, Sparc, Alpha and PowerPC processors. Porting to other
architectures should be rather easy.

ECL is currently hosted at SourceForge. The home page of the project
is http://ecls.sourceforge.net, and in it you will find source code
releases, a CVS tree and some useful documentation.


Known issues
============

* Cygwin's library is still broken: fork/exec fails to reload the
  cygwin library, or ECL's compiled libraries in a completely random
  fashion. For this reason we recommend using ext:system instead of
  ext:run-program in that platform.

* In Windows ECL comes with bytecodes compiler by default, because C
  compilers are normally not avaiable. Unfortunately several
  libraries out there are not prepared for this. If you plan to use
  quicklisp and have a C compiler accessible to ECL, you may use
  (ext:install-c-compiler) to switch back to the Lisp-to-C compiler.


Changes since last release
==========================

Some highlights of this release are:

* ECL now ships with the whole of the Unicode names database,
  optimally compressed using constant C tables. This means ECL now
  recognizes all valid Unicode (and ASCII) names for the whole range
  of characters, and can print them as well.

* ECL has changed the way it stores compiled data in the C files, so
  that it works around the limit of 65k characters per string.

* ECL now builds with Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2012.

* We bend the knee and accepted WHILE/IF statements intertwined with
  FOR/AS, though this is still not valid ANSI Common Lisp.

See file src/CHANGELOG or browse it online

http://ecls.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ecls/ecl/src/CHANGELOG?view=markup

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