GENERAL INFORMATION
-------------------

Armed Bear Common Lisp is an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp that runs in a
Java virtual machine.


LICENSE
-------

Armed Bear Common Lisp is distributed under the GNU General Public License
(with a special exception described below).

A copy of GNU General Public License (GPL) is included in this distribution, in
the file COPYING.

Linking this software statically or dynamically with other modules is making a
combined work based on this software. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU
General Public License cover the whole combination.

As a special exception, the copyright holders of this software give you
permission to link this software with independent modules to produce an
executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and
to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice,
provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and
conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module
which is not derived from or based on this software. If you modify this
software, you may extend this exception to your version of the software, but
you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this
exception statement from your version.


INSTALLATION
------------

To build ABCL, you'll need a 1.4 or 1.5 JDK and a supported Common Lisp
implementation (SBCL, CMUCL, Allegro, LispWorks, or CLISP).

Edit the file customizations.lisp, in the directory containing this README
file, to suit your situation, paying attention to the comments in the file.

Start up one of the supported Common Lisp implementations in the directory
containing this README file.

Load build-abcl.lisp:

    (load "build-abcl.lisp")

Then do:

    (build-abcl:build-abcl :clean t :full t)

Wait for the build to finish and exit the host Lisp.

Use abcl.bat on Windows or ./abcl on Unix to start ABCL. (Note that abcl.bat
and abcl contain absolute paths, so you'll need to edit the relevant file if
you move things around after the build.)

If the build fails in the javac stage, you might have better luck with this:

    (build-abcl:build-abcl :clean t :full t :batch nil)

This invokes javac separately for each .java file, which is considerably slower
but avoids running into limitations on command line length.


BUGS
----

ABCL is a very young implementation. You are certain to encounter bugs.

ABCL 0.0.7 fails 90 out of 21206 tests in the GCL ANSI test suite.

ABCL's CLOS does not handle on-the-fly redefinition of classes correctly, and
in any event is intolerably slow. There is no support for the long form of
DEFINE-METHOD-COMBINATION, and certain other required CLOS features are also
missing. Enough CLOS is there to run ASDF and CL-PPCRE, if you're in no hurry.

There's no MOP worth mentioning.

Since this is only the third public release, there are likely to be build
problems as well as runtime bugs.

Please report problems to the j-devel mailing list:

    armedbear-j-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

Have fun!

Peter Graves
July 4, 2005