Steel Bank Common Lisp 2.6.7 Brings New Features and Optimizations

Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

I am excited to share the release of Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7, which introduces a new interactive manual module and expands SIMD support for ARM64 and X86-64. This update includes critical bug fixes for compiler errors and miscompilations, alongside performance optimizations for UTF-8 handling and complex number operations. We have also refined documentation and fixed various platform-specific issues to ensure a smoother experience for developers across different architectures.

The manual can thus be explored interactively in the usual way, and it is browsable with the MGL-PAX library.
  1. leonmeng

    SB-MANUAL looks great—having the manual available through docstrings and SLIME should make SBCL development much more pleasant.

  2. taolson

    Fun fact I learned from a Func Prog podcast: the name Steel Bank is a play on it's origin as Carnegie-Mellon Common Lisp (Carnegie made his fortune in Steel, while Mellon did so with Banks):

    https://www.sbcl.org/history.html

  3. OuterVale

    Steel Bank Common Lisp is what Hacker News uses.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099006

    I discovered this while doing some research for a post the other day: https://vale.rocks/posts/hacker-news

  4. wk_end

    * the SB-SIMD contrib now supports ARM64. (Thanks to Sylvia Harrington)

    * AVX512 instructions are now supported on X86-64. (Thanks to Robert Smith and Arthur Miller)

    * additional support for SIMD instructions on ARM64 and X86-64. (Thanks to Arthur Miller)

    These seem like pretty awesome additions. Does anyone know how SIMD works in SBCL? Is this at the codegen layer? i.e. can it auto-vectorize or anything like that? Or are these intrinsics you have to explicitly ask for?

  5. baq

    I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

More from this day

2026-07-28