Efforts paying off

Well, we've had a nice break on our self-set applicability target. As explained before, a Common Lisp implementation isn't of much use if it's not able to run much of the already-existing software available for the language. As an indicator we use ABCL's ability to run a number of software packages. Maxima is one of them.

Last autumn, ABCL wasn't able to complete the test suite delivered with Maxima. This spring ABCL would run it, but with many errors. Due to continued efforts - from both sides - and mainly the fact that Maxima changed their number comparisons to be CL-compliant (EQL), there are only 3 failures remaining - out of over 4500.

The remaining 3 failure clearly ABCL issues, where the outcome returned is of a lesser precision than expected by Maxima's test suite. So, even though we're not completely there yet, I'd say we're definitely usable with Maxima.

The note to add would be that our performance is less than acceptable with Maxima: a lot slower than any other Lisp implementation. The performance issue will also be addressed from both sides: we'll research how to improve performance (generally) on our side. One thing we know to be a performance issue with Maxima is their over-use of special variables. This is - according to Robert Dodier - something being addressed on their side.

With the specials over-use fixed, ABCL can be over 40% faster, as proven with a local hack to compensate for part of the over-use. Unfortunately, the hack can't make it into the ABCL repository as a general solution.

Work is under way though to improve repeated special binding access. Such repetitions occur if a loop uses a special variable as a looping variable, or if a special variable is used to collect results. The former is a use-case in Maxima's code; the latter is a pattern regularly seen in ABCL's compiler.

In ABCL's current code, each time a special variable is accessed, be it for reading or writing, the binding is looked up. The work focuses on reusing a binding after it has been looked up once. While in most cases this won't make a performance difference: the binding will be used only once, in some applications it may help improve performance quite a bit.