Release notes for ABCL 0.18

Faster initial startup
To achieve faster startup times - required for example by Google App Engine which restarts the servlet regularly - ABCL now delays reflection calls associated function-class resolution by resolving functions upon their first call.
Portable FASLs
As part of a fixed bug, ABCL now has portable fasls: all fasls use UTF-8 as their encoding, instead of the system dependent default encoding. This should help easy deployment and deployment to Google App Engine. Because of this change, the FASL version number has increased to 35.
Faster special variable lookup
As part of the continued search for performance improvements has the lookup mechanism for special variable value lookup been changed. Part of this change is the introduction of an API to record unbinding marks for unwinding later on.
Improved reliability with exceptions
Out-of-memory or Stack-overflow conditions can be handled programatically by binding handlers for them in handler-bind. In addition, program execution used to continue on caught but unhandled generic (Throwable) exceptions. This is no longer the case: only specific exceptions get caught, or the generic exception is handled, preventing execution from 'just' continuing.
Fixed memory leak with functions-with-documentation
Functions with documentation going out of scope because of being unused were incorrectly not GC-ed. This has now been resolved.

Release notes for older releases.