S M L / N J   1 1 0 . 38   N E W S

January 28, 2002

WARNING This version is intended for compiler hackers. The version ought to be stable, however we have not run our full regression testing. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/smlnj/index.html

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Details:

• FFI:

• A complete overhaul of the library interfaces and the glue-code generator (ml-nlffigen).  The implementation now scales much better, making it possible to target huge C libraries such as gtk+ etc. (See the README file under src/ml-nlffigen.)
• ML represenation types have been streamlined.
• Getter and setter functions work with concrete values, not abstract ones where possible.
• WORD-style bit-operations on INTEGER representations added.
• Ml-nlffigen command line more flexible (see README file).
• C_Debug added as an alternative to structure C.  The difference is that it always checks for NULL on pointer-dereference operations.
• DynLinkage.open_lib' added.  This function takes an additional list of library handles.  This is used for expressing inter-library (symbol-resolution-)dependencies.
• bug fixes

• MLRISC:

• There is a dramatic simplification in the interface to the register allocator for RISC architectures as a result of making parallel copy instructions explicit. 
• Bugs in x86-fast-fp have been fixed.  It is now turned on by default in SML/NJ.
• Changed the representation of instructions from being fully abstract  to being partially concrete.  See HISTORY file for more details.
• Removed the native COPY and FCOPY instructions from all the architectures and replaced it with the explicit COPY instruction from the previous commit.
• Since COPY instructions are no longer native to the architecture, a generic functor can be used to implement the expandCopies function.
• Allowed EXPORT and IMPORT pseudo-op declarations to appear inside a TEXT segment.
• bug fixes
  

• misc:

• Allen Leung's "nowhere" tool added.
• Minor modifications to pgraph.
• rounding mode-related bug fixed in Basis library