I released SBCL 1.1.6 before the weekend, after the customary one-week period of code freeze and request for testing. Unfortunately, it turns out that the release contains a bug which affects a substantial number of quicklisp libraries: the compiler's transformation of svref was sped up, but unfortunately without sufficient generality, so code doing svref on a symbol-macro fails to compile.

This bug has been fixed in the master branch; this post is somewhat in the vein of a public service announcement: don't use SBCL 1.1.6 if your code or anything it depends on does svref on a symbol-macro. (If it does, a quick workaround is to replace the svrefs with arefs). As well as the public service announcement, though, I have a question for the wider community: how can we encourage testing the code and clearly communicating the results just before the release happens rather than just after? It's somewhat frustrating to have a week-long code freeze, then bug reports of serious issues a few hours after the release is made... and unfortunately answers of the form “just test everything yourself during the freeze period” aren't currently practical. Maybe someday.