FIXME: The material in the CMUCL manual about getting good performance from the compiler should be reviewed, reformatted in Texinfo, lightly edited for SBCL, and substituted into this manual. In the meantime, the original CMUCL manual is still 95+% correct for the SBCL version of the Python compiler. See the sections
Besides this information from the CMUCL manual, there are a few other points to keep in mind.
let
, let*
, inline function call, and so
forth. However, it's much more passive and dumb about inferring the
types of values assigned with setq
, setf
, and
friends. It would be nice to fix this, but in the meantime don't
expect that just because it's very smart about types in most respects
it will be smart about types involved in assignments. (This doesn't
affect its ability to benefit from explicit type declarations
involving the assigned variables, only its ability to get by without
explicit type declarations.)
Finally, note that Common Lisp defines many constructs which, in the infamous phrase, “could be compiled efficiently by a sufficiently smart compiler”. The phrase is infamous because making a compiler which actually is sufficiently smart to find all these optimizations systematically is well beyond the state of the art of current compiler technology. Instead, they're optimized on a case-by-case basis by hand-written code, or not optimized at all if the appropriate case hasn't been hand-coded. Some cases where no such hand-coding has been done as of SBCL version 0.6.3 include
(reduce #'f x)
where the type of x
is known at compile
time
(position 0
some-bit-vector)
(remove item list :count 1)
(locally (declare (safety 1)) (assoc item
list))
(which currently performs safe endp
checking internal
to assoc).
If your system's performance is suffering because of some construct
which could in principle be compiled efficiently, but which the SBCL
compiler can't in practice compile efficiently, consider writing a
patch to the compiler and submitting it for inclusion in the main
sources. Such code is often reasonably straightforward to write;
search the sources for the string “deftransform
” to find many
examples (some straightforward, some less so).