A Mudballs Update

Yes, I know it's late but better late than never right.

Anyway, I have just uploaded the 'Christmas Cheer' release of mudballs which, unfortunately, will require a fresh install of mudballs for existing users as there was a rather egregious oversight regarding the updating of systems.

Noteworthy Features

• A publicly editable wiki has now been made available at http://redmine.mudballs.com/wiki/mudballs/   New pages can be created by opening the appropriate URL. For example, http://redmine.mudballs.com/wiki/mudballs/hunchentoot will  show an option for creating a new page. 
• The start of a mudballs FAQ can be found on it's wiki page: http://redmine.mudballs.com/wiki/mudballs/FAQ.
  
• down-casing of pathnames has been fixed. Down-casing will now only happen for components named with symbols.
  
• New versions of all systems, including core systems such as :cl-ppcre, can now be updated without having to reinstall mudballs.
  
• (mb:install :cl-ppcre :file "/path/to/file") now works.
  
• The output path of component is now calculated correctly (including honoring the :fasl-output-root preference).
  
• Uninstalled systems are no longer considered  for an operation if there is an installed version of the system present unless explicitly requested using the :version keyword.
  
• The fasl-path of system definition files is no longer the same as components of a system as this was conflicting with the output of compiling components.
  
• And other small fixes

As always mudballs is available for download from the releases directory and instructions can be found here.

Please let me know if any server on mudballs.com is not responding as my hosting provider is being a little flaky of late.

Thanks to the following people for reports and ideas.

- Magnus Malm

- Luke Renn

- Leigh Smith

The 'pre Arc' Arc

Seeing that arc is the word on everyones lips I thought I'd take a quick peek.

In Summary.
- data in the functional position is interesting.
- [] function syntax is neat (and almost as nice as the #L syntax in iterate)
- foo:bar for function composition reads quite nicely (once you get out of the CL mindset)

The rest is kind of 'meh' and then i realized, wait a second, a Lisp1 with more Lisp than Scheme and unhygienic macros,  I've seen that before and I had, it is called rep.  This is the Lisp that powers sawfish which (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) was the default window manager for GNOME for quite some time.

This was actually the Lisp that I cut my teeth on way back in 2001 (Grief, I can't believe it was that long ago)  and looking back on it brings back some fond memories and reminds me how full featured it was (especially for something at version 0.17), to list some of them:

• Profiler
• Module system (modelled on Scheme48)
• Tail call elimination
• Byte Compiled
• First class Continuations
• Regexes
• Threading
• Good access to OS 
• Ability to load .so files
• Bindings to mysql
• Built in documentation via the ,desc operator

and Most importantly it has apropos, god knows why arc is missing this.

darjeeling

This looks as if it could be quite interesting.

The ability to convert Ruby to Common Lisp (or ideally just load ruby files) should put paid to complaints about the lack of libraries in CL.

Of course it could turn out to be absolutely nothing but I'm going to keep an eye on it.

Lispworks 5.1 Personal Edition

At last, Lispworks Ltd has announced the release of Lispworks 5.1 Personal Edition!

New features
- Threading now uses pthread on Linux
- FreeBSD port
- Support for Intel Mac's

More here