Standard ML of New Jersey Release Notes

Standard ML of New Jersey
Release Notes
Version 110.94
October 31, 2019

SML/NJ HOME

  https://smlnj.org

FILES

  https://smlnj.org/dist/working/110.94/

## Summary

This release is the first to provide support for 64-bit executables on Linux and macOS. Support for other operating systems (BSD variants and 64-bit windows) will be included in future releases.

This release also fixes a critical bug in the Windows implementation of some of the `Math` functions.

## Details

### Installation

#### 64-bit support

The various installation and configuration scripts have been updated to accept a command-line argument to override the default machine size when running on the x86/amd64 architecture. For the `config/install.sh` script, you can specify the machine-word size of the target architecture as follows:

-default size

  specify the default size for the sml and other commands, where size is either 32 or 64.

-32

  install the 32-bit version of the system.

-64

  install the 64-bit version of the system.

It is possible to install both versions in the same location by running the `install.sh` script twice. For example, the commands

      % config/install.sh -32
      % config/install.sh -default 64

will install both versions with the 64-bit version as default. One would then use the command sml -32 to run the 32-bit version of the system.

If both versions are installed, then use the -32 or -64 flag to override the default version.

#### 32-bit macOS issues

While the x86 installer for 110.94 works on macOs 10.14 Mojave, building from source requires some extra steps because the version of Xcode distributed for Mojave does not include a 32-bit SDK.

Another issue that you may encounter when building on macOs 10.14 Mojave is an error message for a shell script of the form

      /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

This error arises because the `com.apple.quarantine` attribute is set on the shell script. To fix the problem, remove the attribute using the command

      xattr -d com.apple.quarantine shell-script

and resume the build.

### Compiler

Various changes were made to support 64-bit targets.

Improved the CPS optimizer to do constant folding on numeric conversions when the argument is a constant.

The fix for bug 130 required a change in the semantics of the type checker. The definition of SML specifies that when typechecking a binding like the following:

      val (x, NONE) = ([], SOME 1)

the type of `x` should be polymorphic since the right-hand-side of the binding is a syntactic value. As of version 110.94, we now have a more restrictive rule for when the left-hand-side variables are made polymorphic. Specifically, the right-hand-side expression must be a syntactic value and the left-hand-side pattern must be irrefutable (which is not the case in this example).

### MLRISC

Fixed a number of bugs in the instruction selection and encoding for the amd64 architecture. Also made a slight improvement to the x86 instruction selector.

### Runtime System

The runtime system has a two-level data structure for the garbage-collector’s BIBOP on 64-bit machines.

Made the handling of the `SysInt.int` and `SysWord.word` types consistent between the runtime system and SML code.

### ML-LPT

Switched the type of source-file positions from `Position.int` to `Int.int`. This change is because the `Position.int` type was changed to `Int64.int` in version 110.89, which is excessive for source-file parsing and which introduces space overhead (64-bit integers are boxed).

## Bugs

Here is a list of tracked bugs fixed (or closed) with this release, please see the bug tracker for more details.

130 | failure to raise `Bind` exception
180 | Missing warning for nonexhaustive valbind patterns
190 | Unexpected exception in SML/NJ with invalid list pattern match
199 | Compiler bug in pretty printing of result
225 | `Math.ln` giving erroneous answers on Windows
226 | SML/NJ does not support 64-bit systems
227 | CPS contraction is taking an excessive amount of time on word8 basis test

## Supported systems

We believe that SML/NJ will build and run on the following systems, but have only tested some of them:

Architecture | Operating System | Status
--- | --- | ---
AMD64 | macOS 10.14 (Mojave) | Tested
| macOS 10.15 (Catalina) | Tested
| Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS | Tested
Power PC | Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) |
| AIX |
Sparc | Solaris |
| Linux |
x86 (32-bit) | Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) |
| Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) |
| Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) |
| Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) |
| Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) |
| Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) |
| macOS 10.12 (Sierra) | Tested
| macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) | Tested
| macOS 10.14 (Mojave) | Tested
| Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS | Tested
| Other Linux variants |
| BSD variants |
| Windows 7 |
| Windows 10 |
| Cygwin (32-bit) |