SBCL 0.7.13 has been tagged in CVS and will I expect be announced on
mailing lists and stuff in the next day or so.  It's been a busy month
for SBCL development: we've added a contrib system, made some speed
improvements, and fixed a ton of ANSI bugs.  Here are some highlights:

  * contrib modules (each of these can be loaded on demand using the
    REQUIRE function)

    ** the ASDF system definition facility makes installing
       third-party libraries using ASDF (such as cCLan modules) much
       simpler.  You need this to load most of the other contribs, actually 

    ** an interface to the BSD Sockets API, including support for TCP,
       UDP and Local-domain sockets

    ** a new interface to the interactive toplevel, including history
       support and user-definable shortcut commands.  The default
       look-and-feel is similar to the toplevel in Allegro Common Lisp

    ** an implementation of ROTATE-BYTE, with efficient implementation
       on x86 hardware.  This opens the way for fast MD5
       implementations, for example
       
    ** a simple command to generate executables (that run from the
       command line) from SBCL compiled files.  Note these do still
       need SBCL to be installed on the target system, but of course
       it's free software, so no licensing issues involved.

  * PCL (the object system) has had speed and stability improvements

  * Many many bug fixes : see the NEWS file for a full list



Other SBCL-related news:

To coincide with the 0.7.13 release, a new port of the CLX (X11 client
a la libX11) library is available separately as an ASDF module.  This
contains all known bugfixes, includes X-over-forwarded-ssh-connection
support, and the SHAPE extension.  It is available from
<http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/lisp/sbcl/>.

In related news, the native threading support is just about at the
point where the terminally brave can play with it and maybe even get
it to do something, and I'll soon be encouraging them to check it out
and see what they find.  With any luck I should be able to bring
Araneida and maybe McCLIM up on it in the near future.