[ANN] CHICKEN 5.3.0 release candidate available

[Peter Bex]

Hello everyone,

We are happy to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming
CHICKEN 5.3.0.

CHICKEN 5.3.0rc1 is now available at this location:
https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2021/08/12/chicken-5.3.0rc1.tar.gz

The SHA256 sum of that tarball is
61d59cb4f3ca226995d7dca3510c7a646c2cf1e28ebc771bf6c5177e28d14c81

This is bugfix release which takes care of several important issues.

Irregex has been updated to the latest upstream (0.9.10), which fixes
a few issues with bol handling and irregex-replace/all with positive
lookbehind replaces all matches rather than just the first.

A few bugs in the module system's handling of reexport have been fixed,
as well as a few bugs in the optimization of using argvector directly
in rest arguments, and a nasty issue where mutated parameters would be
reset if the mutation happened in a signal handler.

A nice improvement is that to build CHICKEN, on most platforms you no
longer need to provide the PLATFORM variable to Make; we auto-detect
the platform you're building on.  Of course, for cross-compilation
you'll still have to set it.

Finally, we tweaked the garbage collector to avoid thrashing when the
heap was almost full.  This should drastically improve performance for
certain usage patterns that trigger this pathological behaviour.

The complete list of changes since version 5.2.0 is available here:
https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2021/08/12/NEWS

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

Here's a suggested test procedure:

  $ make PREFIX=<some dir> install check
  $ <some dir>/bin/chicken-install pastiche

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 5.3.0rc1 for
your software.

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

Operating system: (e.g., FreeBSD 12.0, 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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