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Comment by vindarel | Hacker News Reader

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vindarel·

For those who didn't follow, some news from 2022:

- SBCL is now callable as a shared library

- SIMD support

- faster (de)compression with zstd

- TRACE supports tracing macro functions, compiler-macro functions, individual methods and local functions (flet and labels)

- the SBCL repository reached 20,000 commits.

- Prebuilt SBCL binary for Android (Termux) (unofficial)

https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li...

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SIMD support is huge, and if you're willing to do a little hacking (SBCL is very easy to extend) you can even use it without the intrinsics

In fairness, "SIMD support" is not exactly "the compiler can reduce code to AVX instructions" but more like "you can now write non-portable custom assembly-like code to make your code faster".

but i assume a somewhat nicer interface than the internal VOP intrinsic stuff that sbcl has always had

Still better than no SIMD at all imo

Yup. I used to use Clozure CL all the time, but since the code I write tends to involve lots of number crunching, SB-SIMD and Loopus are indispensible.

Even before SB-SIMD, SBCL has always seemed like the best Common Lisp implementation for any arithmetic. Or at least this seems to be case when you benchmark CCL against it :)

That's what I mean by "willing to hack"! Getting the compiler to use SIMD instructions is actually pretty easy- you just specify where to use them and let it handle them. Then you pinky promise that your array really is made of floats and turn safety off.

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