ECL 26.3.27 release
Tagged as release
Written by Daniel Kochmański and Marius Gerbershagen on 2026-03-27 10:00
We are announcing a new stable ECL release. This release highlights:
- bytecodes closures are now faster and avoid capturing unused parts of the lexical environment
- improvements to the native compiler, including better separation between compiler frontend and backend, reduced function call overhead, more aggressive dead code elimination and many internal improvements and bug fixes
- hash table implementation improvements and bug fixes for collisions
- streams: extensions EXT:PEEK-BYTE, EXT:UNREAD-BYTE, GRAY:STREAM-PEEK-BYTE and GRAY:STREAM-UNREAD-BYTE, bugfixes and implementation refactor
- the codebase has been updated to conform to the C23 standard
- simplified procedure for cross-compiling ECL itself
- support for cross-compilation of Common Lisp code to different targets using a new :TARGET option for COMPILE-FILE
- some fixes for the emscripten target
The release also incorporates many other bug fixes and performance improvements as well as an updated manual. We'd like to thank all people who contributed to ECL with code, testing, issue reports and otherwise.
People listed here contributed code in this iteration: Daniel Kochmański, Marius Gerbershagen, Tarn W. Burton, Kirill A. Korinsky, Dmitry Solomennikov, Kevin Zheng, Mark Shroyer and Sebastien Marie.
People listed here did extensive release candidate testing on various platforms: Marius Gerbershagen, Daniel Kochmański, Dima Pasechnik, Matthias Köppe, Jeremy List, Mark Damon Hughes and Paul Ruetz.
This release is available for download in a form of a source code archive (we do not ship prebuilt binaries):
Finally, a note on the release schedule: ECL releases often take some time to
come out, partially because we do extensive testing against supported platforms
and existing libraries to find regressions. In the meantime all improvements are
incrementally incorporated in the branch develop. It is considered stable and
it is tested and reviewed with necessary dilligence. If release cycle is too
slow for your needs, then we suggest following the branch develop for the most
recent changes.
Happy Hacking,
The ECL Developers
