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.
- 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):
- 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
- 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?
- 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.
- HexDecOctBin
If any SBCL dev is here, please add documentation for how to use the memory arena feature. The only doc is an very old proposal document.
- leonmeng
SB-MANUAL looks great—having the manual available through docstrings and SLIME should make SBCL development much more pleasant.
- WalterGR
If memory serves, traditionally, CCL (Clozure Common Lisp [0]) had better support for Windows but SBCL was unbeatable for speed. Is that still the case?
- NeutralForest
Great to see the project is still going strong, I kinda want to try CL but I always feel like I don't have a great use-case.