[Chicken-announce] [ANN] CHICKEN 5.0.0 release candidate 1 available

[Peter Bex]

Hello everyone,

After many years of development, we are happy to announce the first
release candidate of the upcoming CHICKEN 5.0.0.  This represents the
largest change in CHICKEN since the 4.0.0 release.

Most importantly, we have completely overhauled the module layout so
that it should make more sense where each identifier is located.
For a quick overview of where things are, see the page we used for
discussion of these changes:
https://wiki.call-cc.org/core-libraries-reorganization

The manual has of course also been updated to reflect these new modules:
https://wiki.call-cc.org/man/5/Included%20modules

Other notable features are:
- Full numeric tower
- A new declarative egg description format for chicken-install
- Improved support for static linking (eggs are now also compiled statically)
- "Deployment" mode has been dropped as it was less portable and reliable
  than static linking.
- Builds are fully bit-for-bit reproducible (for core, but user code too)
- Random numbers now use a better PRNG than libc rand() (namely, WELL512)
- Core has gone on a diet: several libraries have been moved to eggs, like
   srfi-1, srfi-13, srfi-14, srfi-18, srfi-69, and several other things.

The (very long!) complete list of changes since version 4.13.0 is
available here: https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2018/08/11/NEWS

CHICKEN 5.0.0rc1 is now available at this location:
https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2018/08/11/chicken-5.0.0rc1.tar.gz

The SHA256 sum of that tarball is
fb8af147e7965761dd212b53162b181d4c9473906fd889e719c71624bca65957

Please give it a test and report your findings to the mailing list.

Here's a suggested test procedure:

  $ make PLATFORM=<platform> PREFIX=<some dir> install check
  $ <some dir>/bin/chicken-install spiffy

If you want to build CHICKEN with a compiler other than the default one,
just use C_COMPILER=<the compiler> (e.g., C_COMPILER=clang) on the make
invocation.

Of course, feel free to explore other supported build options (see the
README file for more information) and actually use CHICKEN 5.0.0rc1 for
your software.  The tireless CHICKEN team has been busy porting eggs to
CHICKEN 5 already, so you will find that many eggs you've been using have
already been ported.  Check out the ever-growing list at
https://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-projects/egg-index-5.html

If you want to port your code to CHICKEN 5, you'll note the number of
changes are so large that it can be overwhelming.  That's why we've
written up a porting guide to help you get your code over to the new
version: https://wiki.call-cc.org/porting-c4-to-c5
Please feel free to add to the guide if you run into problems that aren't
yet addressed on this wiki page.

If you can, please let us know the following information about the
environment you tested the RC tarball on:

Operating system: (e.g., FreeBSD 11.1, Debian 9, Windows 10 mingw-msys under 
mingw32)
Hardware platform: (e.g., x86, x86-64, PPC)
C Compiler: (e.g., GCC 6.4.0, clang 5.0.0)
Installation works?: yes or no
Tests work?: yes or no
Installation of eggs works?: yes or no

Thanks in advance!

The CHICKEN Team

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