Gforth and Vmgen 0.7.0 released

[Anton Ertl]

Gforth 0.7.0 (including Vmgen) is now available on

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/gforth-0.7.0.tar.gz

or on a GNU mirror near you.  The signature is

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/gforth-0.7.0.tar.gz.sig

and the package can be verified as follows:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 760F3526
gpg --verify gforth-0.7.0.tar.gz.sig gforth-0.7.0.tar.gz

A self-installing executable for Windows is available on

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/gforth-0.7.0.exe


* About Gforth:

Gforth is a fast and portable implementation of the ANS Forth
language. It works nicely with the Emacs editor, offers some nice
features such as input completion and history, backtraces, a
decompiler and a powerful locals facility, and it even has a
manual. Gforth combines traditional implementation techniques with
newer techniques for portability and performance: its inner
interpreter is direct threaded with several optimizations, but you can
also use a traditional-style indirect threaded interpreter.  Gforth is
distributed under the GNU General Public license (see COPYING).

Gforth runs under GNU, BSD, and similar systems, MS Windows and MacOS X,
and should not be hard to port to other systems supported by GCC.


* About Vmgen:

Vmgen supports the construction of interpretive systems by generating
the code for executing and dealing with virtual machine (VM)
instructions from simple descriptions of the VM instructions.

Vmgen generates code for executing VM instructions (with optional
tracing), for generating VM code, for disassembling VM code, and for
profiling VM instruction sequences.  A VM instruction description
looks like this:

add  ( i1 i2 -- i )
i = i1+i2;

Vmgen supports several techniques for writing efficient interpreters:
virtual machine interpreters, threaded code, combining VM instructions
into superinstructions, keeping the top-of-stack in a register,
scheduling the dispatch of the next VM instruction, and a couple of
minor optimizations.  Interpreters created with Vmgen usually are
faster than competing interpreters and are typically only a factor of
2-10 slower than the code generateed by native-code compilers.


* Gforth: User-visible changes between 0.6.2 and 0.7.0:

Requirements:
  At run-time requires libtool and gcc (for the libcc C interface) and
                       gdb (for the disassembler (SEE)) on some platforms.
Installation:
  support for DESTDIR, POST_INSTALL, INSTALL_SCRIPT
  automatic performance tuning on building (--enable-force-reg unnecessary)
  report performance and functionality problems at end of "make"
  autogen.sh now exists
License:
  Changed to GPLv3
Bug fixes
  Now works with address-space randomization.
  The single-step debugger works again in some engines.
  Many others.
Ports:
  AMD64, ARM, IA-64 (Itanium): better performance
  PPC, PPC64: disassembler and assembler
  Gforth EC: R8C, 4stack, misc, 8086 work
  MacOS X: better support
Invocation:
  New flags --ignore-async-signals, --vm-commit (default overcommit)
            --print-sequences
Forth 200x:
  X:extension-query: produce true for all implemented extensions
  X:required REQUIRED etc. (not new)
  X:defined: [DEFINED] and [UNDEFINED]
  X:parse-name: PARSE-NAME (new name)
  X:deferred: deferred words (new: DEFER@ DEFER! ACTION-OF)
  X:structures: +FIELD FIELD: FFIELD: CFIELD: etc.
  X:ekeys: new: EKEY>FKEY K-SHIFT-MASK K-CTRL-MASK K-ALT-MASK K-F1...K-F12
  X:fp-stack (not new)
  X:number-prefixes (partially new, see below)
Number prefixes:
  0x is a hex prefix: 0xff and 0XfF now produces (decimal) 255
  # is a decimal prefix: #10 now produces (decimal) 10
  Signs after the number prefix are now accepted, e.g, #-50.
  ' now only handles a single (x)char: 'ab is no longer accepted, 
                                       'a' now produces (decimal) 97
Unicode support (currently supports only uniform encoding):
  added xchars words for dealing with variable-width multi-byte characters
  provide 8bit (ISO Latin 1) and UTF-8 support for xchars
New words:
  \C C-FUNCTION C-LIBRARY END-C-LIBRARY C-LIBRARY-NAME (libcc C interface)
  LIB-ERROR (complements OPEN-LIB)
  OUTFILE-EXECUTE INFILE-EXECUTE BASE-EXECUTE (limited change of global state)
  16-bit and 32-bit memory acces: UW@ UL@ SW@ SL@ W! L! W@ L@ /W /L
  NEXT-ARG SHIFT-ARGS (OS command-line argument processing)
  NOTHROW (for backtrace control)
  FTRUNC FMOD (undocumented)
  SEE-CODE SEE-CODE-RANGE (show generated dynamic native code)
Improvements/changes of existing words:
  S\", .\" now support \l, \m, \z, and limits hex and octal character specs.
  OPEN-FILE with W/O no longer creates or truncates files (no compat. file)
  OPEN-LIB now understands ~ at the start, like OPEN-FILE.
  TRY...ENDTRY changed significantly, compatibility files available (see docs).
  The disassembler (DISCODE) can now use gdb to disassemble code
  Uninitialized defered words now give a warning when executed
  Division is floored (disable with "configure --enable-force-cdiv")
  Gforth (not gforth-fast) reports division by zero and overflow on division
    on all platforms.
Newly documented words:
  S>NUMBER? S>UNUMBER?
  EKEY keypress names: K-LEFT  K-RIGHT K-UP K-DOWN K-HOME K-END K-PRIOR
    K-NEXT K-INSERT K-DELETE
  CLEARSTACKS
  FORM
Environment variable GFORTHSYSTEMPREFIX (used by word SYSTEM and friends)
C interface:
  exported symbols now start with "gforth_" (for referencing them from C code)
  libcc C function call interface (requires libtool and gcc at run-time)
    alternative: undocumented libffi-based interface
Libraries:
  depth-changes.fs: report stack depth changes during interpretation
  ans-report.fs now reports CfV extensions
  fsl-util.4th: FSL support files (undocumented)
  regexp.fs for regular expressions (undocumented)
  complex.fs for complex numbers (undocumented)
  fft.fs for Fast Fourier Transform (undocumented)
  wf.fs, a Wiki implementation (undocumented)
  httpd.fs, a web server (undocumented)
  status.fs, show interpreter status in separate xterm (undocumented)
  profile.fs for profiling (undocumented, incomplete)
  endtry-iferror.fs, recover-endtry.fs to ease the TRY change transition
  test/tester.fs: Now works with FP numbers (undocumented)
  test/ttester.fs: Version of tester.fs with improved interface (T{...}T).
 compat library:
  compat/execute-parsing.fs
Speed improvements:
  automatic performance tuning on building
  static stack caching (good speedup on PPC)
  mixed-precision division is now faster
  support for int128 types on AMD64
  workarounds for gcc performance bugs (in particular, PR 15242)
  branch target alignment (good speedup on Alpha).


* Vmgen: User-visible changes between 0.6.2 and 0.7.0:

Bugfixes (in particular a Gforth bug when dealing with "../" is fixed).

Vmgen by default behaves just as in 0.6.2.  While some advances have
  been implemented, the result is not mature enough for general
  consumption and is therefore disabled by default.

- anton