2006-05-28
We are pleased to announce Guile release 1.6.8. This is the next maintenance release for the old 1.6 stable series. The current stable series is 1.8.

You can find it here:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.6.8.tar.gz

Its SHA1 checksum is

5c244f730d7aaee32db4b0cc77b688f74a5caa71 guile-1.6.8.tar.gz

• Guile 1.6 should build correctly when using GCC 4.0.
• The readline-set! procedure should now work.
• Multi-line #!!# comments can end without a trailing newline.
• Guile now relies on the upstream SLIB code (guile.init) to handle the load process. Previously Guile relied on its own copy of that code, which was incorrect, at least for more recent versions of SLIB. See NEWS for more information.
• The R5RS numerator and denominator procedures have been added.
• In the past, a value that was printed (using `display' or `write') would be incorrectly protected from GC for a while afterward. This has been fixed.
• The number->string's procedure should now handle polar format complex numbers with invalid angles more correctly.
• Some 8-bit char problems have been fixed in string-index, split-string, and other string procedures.
• When cons* and list are called via apply, they should no longer clobber the source list.
• The array-map! procedure allows the omission of source arguments.
• Certain operations involving complex numbers could result in an inappropriate division by zero. This has been fixed.
• The lset-adjoin procedure should now use the provided equality predicate when appropriate.
• The behavior of the lset-union procedure should now more closely match the SRFI-1 specification whenever the first list argument is empty.
• The lset= procedure should now consistently pass arguments to the equality predicate in the correct order.
• A new 2005 leap second has been added to the SRFI-19 code.
• New parameter versions of current-output-port, etc. have been added to the SRFI-39 implementation.
• The make-stack procedure can now correctly construct a stack from a continuation.
• String output port performance has been improved.

2006-02-12
We are pleased to announce the release of Guile 1.8.0. It can be found here:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.8.0.tar.gz

Its SHA1 checksum is

22462680feeda1e5400195c01dee666162503d66 guile-1.8.0.tar.gz

The NEWS file is quite long. Here are the most interesting entries:

Changes since 1.6:
• Guile is now licensed with the GNU Lesser General Public License.
• The manual is now licensed with the GNU Free Documentation License.
• We now use GNU MP for bignums.
• We now have exact rationals, such as 1/3.
• We now use native POSIX threads for real concurrent threads.
• There is a new way to initalize Guile that allows one to use Guile from threads that have not been created by Guile.
• Mutexes and condition variables are now always fair. A recursive mutex must be requested explicitely.
• The low-level thread API has been removed.
• There is now support for copy-on-write substrings and mutation-sharing substrings.
• A new family of functions for converting between C values and Scheme values has been added that is future-proof and thread-safe.
• The INUM macros like SCM_MAKINUM have been deprecated.
• The macros SCM_STRINGP, SCM_STRING_CHARS, SCM_STRING_LENGTH, SCM_SYMBOL_CHARS, and SCM_SYMBOL_LENGTH have been deprecated.
• There is a new way to deal with non-local exits and re-entries in C code, which is nicer than scm_internal_dynamic_wind.
• There are new malloc-like functions that work better than scm_must_malloc, etc.
• There is a new way to access all kinds of vectors and arrays from C that is efficient and thread-safe.
• The concept of dynamic roots has been factored into continuation barriers and dynamic states.

2006-02-12
We are pleased to announce the release of Guile 1.7.91. This is a release candidate for Guile 1.8.

2005-03-09
We are pleased to announce the release of Guile 1.7.2. This is a 'technology preview' for the upcoming Guile 1.8.

2004-12-21
We are pleased to announce Guile release 1.6.7. This is the next maintenance release for the 1.6 stable series. You can find it here. This is primarily a bugfix release. Please see the NEWS file for a full summary of the changes, but here are the highlights:

• A build problem has been fixed. Previously, on some systems, the build would fail when libguile-ltdl couldn't be found during the build.
• The array-map! and array-map-in-order! functions now allow a single source argument. In prior versions, calls with just one source array were rejected.
• A string->number overflow for bases other than 2, 10 and 16 has been fixed. Among other things, this affected octal literal constants.
• The argument order for the equality predicate passed to the SRFI-1 functions alist-delete and alist-delete! now matches the SRFI-1 specification.
• In accordance with the SRFI-13 specification, the functions string-any and string-every now make a tail call to their predicate function upon reaching the last character in the string.

2004-11-29
We are pleased to announce Guile release 1.6.6. This is the next maintenance release for the 1.6 stable series. You can find it here. This is primarily a bugfix release. Please see the NEWS file for a full summary of the changes, but here are the highlights:

• SRFI-39 should work now. A file was missing from the distribution.
• A libltdl related build problem has been fixed.
• A bug in uvec_equalp has been fixed.
• In scm_charnames and scm_charnums, sp is now an alias for space.

2004-10-05
We are pleased to announce Guile release 1.6.5. This is the next maintenance release for the 1.6 stable series. You can find it here. This is primarily a bugfix release. Please see the NEWS file for a full summary of the changes, but here are the highlights:

• SRFI-31 has been added (special form `rec' for recursive evaluation). Try (use-modules (srfi srfi-31)).
• SRFI-39 has been added (parameter objects)
• SRFI-19 has been fixed: date-week-number now correctly respects the requested day of week starting the week.
• SRFI-4 has been overhauled. Bugs have been fixed, and performance may be improved in certain situations. Among other things, large values in 64-bit homogeneous vectors should print correctly now.
• In the srfi-1 module's delete and delete! functions, the order of the arguments to the "=" procedure now matches the SRFI-1 specification.
Bugs have been fixed that prevented the (re)generation of psyntax.pp.
• The use of scm_must_realloc() for memory which is scanned by GC could trigger a GC scan of a free()d block of memory. This has been fixed.
• array-map! and array-map-in-order! now require at least one source array. Previously a call without any source arrays like (array-map! array proc) would cause a segfault. Now such calls are properly rejected.
• gethost no longer causes an exception when trying to throw an exception.
• call-with-output-string won't segv on a closed port. Now an exception is raised.
• open-pipe, open-input-pipe and open-output-pipe used to leave an extra copy of their pipe file descriptor in the child, which was normally harmless, but could prevent the parent seeing eof or a broken pipe immediately. This has been fixed.
• Properties set with set-source-properties! can now be read back correctly with source-properties.
• Guile is now compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing when gcc is detected.
• The --enable-htmldoc option has been removed from 'configure', because support for translating the documentation into HTML is now always provided. Use 'make html'.

(But what is Guile?)