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Version 1.2 is the latest release of Clozure CL as of April 2008. It is intended to be a more stable release and follow a more regular release schedule than previous versions. It is easier for users who wish to track the "bleeding edge" of development to do so.
Versions 1.2 is available for five platform configurations:
Linux on PowerPC (32-bit and 64-bit implementations)
Mac OS X on PowerPC (32-bit and 64-bit implementations)
Linux on X86-64 (64-bit implementation)
Mac OS X on X86-64 (64-bit implementation)
FreeBSD on X86-64 (64-bit implementation)
A 64-bit version of Clozure CL requires a 64-bit processor running a 64-bit OS variant.
There are ongoing efforts to port Clozure CL to the Windows operating system and to 32-bit x86 processors.
Additional platform-specific information is given in the following subsections.
Older versions are still available for downloading as tarballs. Version 1.0 was a stable version released in late 2005. Version 1.1 was under active development until late 2007. A final 1.1 release was never made. It was distributed as a series of development "snapshots" and CVS updates. 1.1 snapshots introduced support for x86-64 platforms, internal use of Unicode, and many other features, but were moving targets.
Clozure CL requires version 2.2.13 (or later) of the Linux kernel and version 2.1.3 (or later) of the GNU C library (glibc) at a bare minimum.
Clozure CL runs on relatively recent Linux distributions for the x86-64 architecture. It requires a Linux with Thread Local Storage support in the toolchain and standard libraries, and the New Posix Thread Library (NPTL). Fortunately, these features seem to be present in all current Linux distributions for x86-64, though there may be some problems with early Linux distributions for x86-64. Some GCC versions older than 4.0 on Linux have been known to have problems compiling some of the C code in the kernel; some very old Linux distributions don't follow the current ABI standards with regard to segment register usage; some early Linux kernels for x86-64 had problems mapping large regions of the address space; and so on. It's difficult to enumerate exactly what versions of which Linux distributions have what problems. A rule of thumb is that—because much of the development of Clozure CL for x86-64 took place in that time frame—Linux distributions released earlier than early 2006 may have problems running Clozure CL.
Clozure CL runs on FreeBSD on x86-64 (FreeBSD releases generally call the platform "amd64"). Clozure CL should run under FreeBSD 6.0 or later; as of this writing, FreeBSD 7.0 is about to be released and it may be necessary for FreeBSD 7 users to install the "compat6x" package in order to use a version of Clozure CL built on FreeBSD 6.x.
Clozure CL runs under OS X versions 10.4 and 10.5 and requires at least version 10.3.9
The 64-bit DarwinPPC version of Clozure CL requires functionality introduced in OSX 10.4 (namely, the ability to run 64-bit binaries). The 64-bit DarwinPPC version also, obviously, requires a G5 processor.
Clozure CL hasn't been tested under Darwin proper, but Clozure CL doesn't intentionally use any Mac OS X features beyond the Darwin subset and therefore it seems likely that Clozure CL would run on PPC Darwin versions that correspond to recent OSX versions.
Clozure CL runs on 64-bit DarwinX86 (Mac OS X on Intel).
Clozure CL Darwinx8664/MacOS X requires a 64-bit processor. All Macintoshes currently sold by Apple (as of early 2008) and all Macintoshes introduced by Apple since August 2006 have such processors. However, the original MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Intel iMacs (models introduced in early 2006) used 32-bit Core Duo processors, and so Clozure CL will not (yet) run on them.
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