Quickref 2.0 "Be Quick or Be Dead" is out

Surfing on the energizing wave of ELS 2019, the 12th European Lisp Symposium, I’m happy to announce the release of Quickref 2.0 “Be Quick or Be Dead”, our reference manual aggregator for Common Lisp libraries.

The major improvement in this release, justifying an increment of the major version number (and the very appropriate codename), is the introduction of parallel algorithms for building the documentation. I presented this work last week in Genova so I won’t go into the gory details here, but for the brave and impatient, let me just say that using the parallel implementation is just a matter of calling the build function with :parallel t :declt-threads x :makeinfo-threads y (adjust x and y as you see fit, depending on your architecture).

The second featured improvement is the introduction of an author index, in addition to the original one. The author index is still a bit shaky, mostly due to technical problems (calling asdf:find-system almost two thousand times simply doesn’t work) and also to the very creative use that some library authors have of the ASDF author and maintainer slots in the system descriptions. It does, however, a quite decent job for the majority of the authors and their libraries’reference manuals.

Finally, the repository now has a fully functional continuous integration infrastructure, which means that there shouldn’t be anymore lags between new Quicklisp (or Quickref) releases and new versions of the documentation website.

Thanks to Antoine Hacquard, Antoine Martin, and Erik Huelsmann for their contribution to this release! A lot of new features are already in the pipe. Currently documenting 1720 libraries, and counting…