Release Announcement for v7.8

[John Clements]

The release announcement sketch that I have so far is below. Please
mail me new items and/or edits.

Please phrase announcements using complete sentences and avoid the
word "now".
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* Racket CS may become the default Racket implementation in the next
release. With the improvements in this release, Racket CS provides
all of the functionality of Racket BC (the current default
implementation). Between this release and the next, if Racket CS
testing and use uncovers no bugs that are more serious than ones
typically discovered in Racket BC, then Racket CS can become the
default.

* Racket CS supports AArch32 and AArch64. The implementation should be
considered experimental in this initial release, stable in all
future releases.

* Racket CS supports an "incremental" garbage-collection mode that can
eliminate long GC pauses for some applications, such as animations
and interactive games.

* Racket CS unboxes local floating-point arithmetic (like Racket BC).

* xrepl (used in command-line racket) includes an `,exn` command that
prints or saves the last exception.

* The Spell Check features lower overhead and has fewer bugs.

* The web server has multiple performance improvements and added
convenience features.

* The math library includes the Kronecker product.

* Racket CS supports immobile objects via `make-immobile-bytevector`
and `make-immobile-vector`.

* Windows supports finer granularity for `sleep` when sleeping for
short periods of time, improving performance in animation.

* Racket CS for arm32le has threads enabled

* The new prop:struct-field-info property provides static information
about field names

* Debugging context in Racket CS is limited to 64,000 frames (approximately
the same as Racket BC). This reduces the time taken to handle out-of-memory
failures.

* The `read-xml` function uses `{open,get}-output-string` to speed up
xml reading.

* In `plot`, the legend font and the plot font can be controlled independently,
and error-bars have an `#:invert?` option.

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[Matthew Flatt]

At 30 Jul 2020 14:34:20 -0400, "'John Clements' via Racket Developers" wrote:
> * Racket CS supports immobile objects via `make-immobile-bytevector`
> and `make-immobile-vector`.

Those are Scheme-level functions that are used to implement parts of
`ffi/unsafe`, such as `(malloc 'atomic-interior ...)`. I'd leave this
bullet out.

> * Racket CS for arm32le has threads enabled

Fold into the earlier bullet?

* Racket CS supports AArch32 and AArch64, including places and
futures. The implementation should be considered experimental in

this initial release, stable in all future releases.

Thanks!
Matthew