Release notes for Clozure CL 1.8

Many bug fixes and improvements have been made to the ARM port.

Cocoa-based IDE

The IDE can communicate with a remote lisp process via a new protocol named "swink". (The verb "to swink" means to toil or to slave.)

The variable ccl:@, which is set by the inspector to the object being inspected, is available in the listener.

"CCL" is now a special Objective-C word, so that names like "ccl-application" will be translated to "CCLApplication". This prefix is reserved for CCL's own private use.

The function execute-in-gui was rewritten to use a different method of thread synchronization.

Miscellaneous

On Unix-based systems, the HOME environment variable is now used by default to initialize user-homedir-pathname. This is optional: set ccl:*trust-paths-from-user-environment to nil to disable this.

Minor incompatible change: the lisp kernel no longer treats a single command-line argument as an image name. This enables users to avoid writing a shell script wrapper for simple "standalone binaries" in some cases.

In certain cases, CASE and similar constructs compile into a jump table and therefore execute in constant time.