Ann: SWI-Prolog 5.8.0

[Jan Wielemaker]

Hi,

After many releases in the 5.7.x development branch, there is finally
a new SWI-Prolog stable release: 5.8.0. Highlights:

* Better performance. Your mileage may vary, but depending on the
programming style you can expect betweem 10% and 50% improvement
on large programs. Small programs sometimes show much larger
speedups (but are not very relevant).

Maybe more interesting: the intrastructure to play with the virtual
machine is much more accessible.

* Better compatibility. Notably:
- Compliant :- meta_predicate handling
- ISO compliant :- initialization handling
- System libraries can no longer be compremised by predicate
and operator declarations in the user module.
- Many details in provided predicates.

* Many enhancements to the (semantic) web libraries

* Many enahancements to clp(fd) and CHR constraint libraries.

* Support for TIPC (high-performance local area network connectivity for
some operating systems (notably Linux)).

* Lots of small stuff.

This release has been made possible by many people contributing code,
comments, bug-reports and -fixes. See

http://www.swi-prolog.org/Contributors.html

Thanks!

Enjoy --- Jan

P.s. www.swi-prolog.org is a web-server running in SWI-Prolog. It provides
nice comprehensive access to the documentation. With an average
20,000 hits per day and over 3Gb traffic per day it is a nice testbed
for Prolog based hosting.