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GNU Smalltalk

Changes: Error backtraces include line numbers and filenames. FileDescriptor is now a subclass of Stream, and the old superclass ByteStream has been removed. Some functions exported by the VM to plugin modules are now thread-safe. Stream operations try to eliminate useless copies and garbage collections when moving data from stream to stream. Support for imports was added to namespaces. The sockets package was renamed from TCP to Sockets as it now supports IPv6 and AF_UNIX sockets (in the Sockets package). Bindings to OpenGL and GLUT were contributed.

Changes: A few operations on collections have been sped up. Code without a space between a binary minus and a number, such as "a-2", is parsed correctly. Sockets use the close-on-exec option. Bugs were fixed regarding pipes, FIFO files, nested exception handlers, virtual filesystems, HTTP, bytecode optimization, Stream iteration, and the Windows port.

Changes: The command-line option -S was fixed to actually work. GC bugs in SQLite bindings and other rare finalization bugs were fixed. The JIT compiler was fixed. More fixes were made for MinGW compilation. Generational GC is now disabled on Alpha. gst-load has a new command-line option -i to build an image from scratch with preloaded packages. URLs can be passed to FileDescriptor class>>#open:mode:ifFail:. New methods were backported from the development versions. A system-installed libffi can be used and the included libffi has been upgraded to version 3.0.4.

Changes: Bindings to Cairo and LibSDL were contributed. The order for searching pool dictionaries was changed to a new one that will have less surprising results in some cases. Processes support thread-local variables. To facilitate the creation of library bindings, CObjects can be backed with garbage-collected (as opposed to heap-allocated) storage. The VFS subsystem was rewritten; the new implementation is inspired by the Ruby Rio library. Finally, if possible, the installation is made relocatable.

Changes: This release adds a port of Seaside (an application server) and Swazoo (a Web server). It supports remote control of a virtual machine and remote starting/stopping of packages such as Seaside and Swazoo.