Gerbil v0.18.1 NimzoLarsen released

[fare]

We are happy to announce the release of Gerbil v0.18.1, NimzoLarsen.

https://github.com/mighty-gerbils/gerbil/releases/tag/v0.18.1

Gerbil v0.18.1 is a patch release, that consolidates the foundations laid out by v0.18 and fixes minor bugs, paving the way for Gerbil v1.0 in the near future. Since this is a patch for the v0.18 Nimzowitsch release, we call it NimzoLarsen after the most famous Chess opening popularized by Nimzowitsch.

Gerbil Homepage: https://cons.io

Release Notes

As notable new features:

• :std/net/s3 is a S3 client (for remote data storage on e.g. AWS)
• :std/net/smtp is an SMTP client (for sending email), and
• :std/db/postgresql now supports SSL (notably enabling Gerbil on Heroku).

Also, the library :std/getopt was moved to :std/cli/getopt (old name available as an alias), next to new CLI modules:
:std/cli/multicall (multicall programs), :std/cli/print-exit (display Scheme results to CLI), :std/cli/shell (escape strings for Unix shells).

A lot of standard library modules, many of them added just before v0.18, were tested, documented, fixed, tweaked and/or extended with new functionality: :std/error, :std/debug/DBG (great for "print-debugging"), :std/io, :std/misc/bytes, :std/misc/evector (extensible vectors), :std/misc/list, :std/misc/number, :std/misc/ports, :std/misc/prime, :std/misc/process, :std/misc/string, :std/misc/vector, :std/net/json-rpc, :std/os/error, :std/parser/ll1 (LL(1) parser combinators, née :std/text/basic-parsers), :std/pregexp, :std/sugar, :std/text/char-set.

The runtime exports a few more functions (vector-ref-set!, fx>=0 and such), and a few bugs were fixed (#1048, #1064).

Last but not least, upgrading the Gambit embedded in Gerbil (#1030) fixed a long-standing issue with letrec*, also affected Gerbil's def (that expands to it), causing evaluation to be reordered in sometimes incorrect way wrt the order of expressions in the source. Un-reordering of code evaluations may also surprisingly affect correct code: e.g. unit-tests in Glow depended on a given evaluation order in the compiler, and broke when the reordering of some evaluations didn't happen anymore.