newLISP® v.10.4.0 Stable Release rev 2012-2-14

This stable release features a rewritten message queue interface for multiprocessing and an extension of the foreign function import API. This release also fixes bugs and makes efficiency inprovements.

Additions and changes

• import now has a second syntax to specify return and parameter value data types. This new extended API usese libffi. This extension to the current foreign functions interface is available in all standard binary installs of newLISP.
• The extended callback API allows specifying return and parameter value data types. Like the extended import, the enhanced callback syntax uses libffi.
• The now time function now returns the GMT offset with opoposite signs, positive for east and negative for west of the UCT Meridian. The day-of-the-year number now starts with 1 instead of offset 0. Both changes make now more ISO 8601 compliant.
• Bit 11 - hex 0x400 - in the last field of sys-info is set for extended FFI enabled versions requiring libffi.
• The speed of read-line, when used with a file handle, has been increased many times to the same speed as when used with STDIN.
• A reworked send, receive message API is multiple times faster and has consistent performance on different OS platforms. The channel for each child is now a dual read/write message queue internally using Unix, local domain sockets. In previous version only one message could be written with send. Now mutiple message can be placed into a queue on the same channel and retrieved on the receiving end with multiple receive statements, until returning nil when the queue is empty. On the sending side, send will return nil when the queue is full.
  
  New call patterns for send and receive let the parent process filter child PIDs to target only those child processes, which are either ready to receive or target those from which messages can be be read. The (send) form allows the parent process to filter all those child PIDs, which are ready to receive messages sent by the parent. The (receive) form returns a list of child PIDs ready with messages in their sending queues to be read by the parent process.
• The creation of a communications channel between and parent process and spawned child processes for usage with send and receive, is now optional:
  

      (spawn sym-variable child-process [true])
  

  If the send or receive is used with child-process spawned, the optional flag must be set to true.
• The dummy versions of spawn, sync and abort in the MS Windows version have been taken out.
• struct allows creating structure data types for usage with the extended import API.
• In unify the underscore symbol: _ matches any atom, list or bound or unbound variable.
• The library file newlisp.dll is now installed in its old location in the main newlisp program directory. No administrator rights are necessary for installing in that location. This library is only required for third party applications, not for newLISP itself.
• The minumum Java version to run Guiserver is now Java JRE version 1.6.

Bug fixes

• A longstanding bug for ithe list-mode of net-select has been fixed. Now, net-select does return socket numbers in the ready list not 0's (zeros).
• The link feature using newlisp-x.x.x/util/link.lsp now also works when linking with 64-bit versions of newLISP.

Compatibility with previous versions

Previous versions using spawn together with message functions send and receive should now include the true flag in spawn calls to enable communications channel between parent and child processes. spawn should specify the optional true flag to enable send and receive messaging with spawned child processes. The GMT offset and day-of-the-year values are reported differently. In all other areas, this version if fully compatible with the previous stable release version 10.3.3.