» Saturday, 21 April A.D. 2007
new ironclad release
Ironclad 0.21 is out; it can be downloaded from the usual location.
The primary motivation for this release is bugfixes: Sven Van Caekenberghe emailed me to let me know that a pile of tests were failing in LispWorks, including all of digest tests. And since most people, I think, use Ironclad for the digest functionality, that made Ironclad pretty much worthless if you were using LispWorks. All these failures were more or less Ironclad's fault and have been corrected in this release. Thanks very much Sven! There are fixes for other minor problems that have been reported since the 0.20.1 release; these are all noted in the NEWS file accompanying the release.
(As an aside: if LispWorks implementors are reading this or happen to be directed this way, I am interested in using your INT32 API to accelerate Ironclad, rather than consing bignums like mad. However, this API only deals with signed 32-bit integers, whereas Ironclad really wants to deal with unsigned 32-bit integers. Implementing things like unsigned shifts on top of a signed API is going to get a bit messy and I have no idea if things work out right on a 64-bit platform. So, I realize that you are under no obligation to a lone Open Source Lisp developer, but I can't imagine it being too difficult to add unsigned variants to the INT32 API to make things easier for people like me. Thanks.)
posted by Nate @ 4:02PM