SigScheme 0.8.0 Release Note
============================

What's SigScheme
----------------

SigScheme is a R5RS Scheme interpreter for embedded use.

It features small footprint (64KB in library form on the 'small' configuration)
like SIOD and TinyScheme, low memory consumption (2-words per cons cell),
multibyte characters handling (UTF-8, EUCs and Shift_JIS) and more.

It is mainly developed to be the Scheme interpreter of uim.

  Homepage:
    http://code.google.com/p/sigscheme/


About This Release
------------------

This distribution of SigScheme 0.8.0 is latest stable release of the
software. And this release will be adopted by uim 1.5.0, the primary
application of SigScheme.

This release aimed to acquire many useful features such as SRFI-1 (see "What's
New" section), and to complete code validations for most part of
SigScheme. Following features that left unvalidated in 0.7.x series have been
validated and now can be used for production codes.

  - R5RS characters
  - All string procedures of R5RS
  - R5RS vectors
  - SRFI-2
  - SRFI-8
  - Multibyte character processing

But R5RS hygienic macros feature is still likely having a reliability problem,
and also contains architectural inefficiency. See "Hygienic macros" subsection
of doc/spec.txt for details. It is expected to be resolved in 0.9.0.

See the file 'QALog' for further information about the quality assurance state.

Please report us if you find a problem. And if you have a time, run
'make-report.sh' and send us the result regardless of PASSed or FAILed. It
greatly helps the development, especially for non-PC platforms.

Mailinglist: sigscheme-ja@googlegroups.com


What's New
----------

  - SRFI-0  Feature-based conditional expansion construct
  - SRFI-1  List Library (full-featured)
  - SRFI-9  Defining Record Types
  - SRFI-43 Vector library
  - SRFI-55 require-extension
  - SRFI-69 Basic hash tables
  - SRFI-95 Sorting and Merging
  - R5RS promises (delay and force)
  - define-macro
  - let-optionals* for optional argument processing
  - Character codec handling procedures

See 'NEWS' for the fully detailed changes.


Notes for Packagers and System Integrators
------------------------------------------

  - This release introduced various system-installed Scheme libraries. Please
    install them in addition to libsscm

  - libgcroots has been updated and bundled in this release. Since it is
    installed as a separated library independent of libsscm, please create its
    own package, and make SigScheme package depending on it with
    "--with-libgcroots=installed"

  - The ABI of libsscm varies by configuration. So to make libsscm sharable,
    please specify "--enable-conf=full" and keep other feature options
    untouched for system-installed library

  - The options "--enable-debug" and/or "--enable-backtrace" make SigScheme
    quite heavy. Please keep them unspecified for normal library
