Maxima on ABCL: full pass on the test suite

Over the past two weeks Raymond Toy helped out to fix the last 9 failures in the Maxima test suite running: ABCL now passes the full 8.666 Maxima tests! We achieved a goal set for ABCL more than two years ago!

Thinking back to the days when Peter Graves had just handed over the project shows just how far we have come: back in September 2008 lots of tests (423, according to Hunter Monroe) would plainly terminate the test suite. That number had come down from over 1000 tests crashing the test suite in January of that year.

After manually disabling the crashing tests, Hunter Monroe writes on September 27 (2008) that he's been able to complete the tests with a total number of failures of 612 (out of 4454 tests) .

Many of the problems were caused by incorrect handling of special variables which was one of the first things to be addressed in ABCL - stabilizing over the first half of 2009. Other improvements which contributed to the stability of Maxima were fixes to the code generating non-local returns (THROW, GOTO stepping out of a closure, RETURN-FROM stepping out of a closure). Next to its reduction in specials, the Maxima team had to change lots of number comparisons from EQ to EQL, because in ABCL integers aren't (guaranteed) to be EQ - which is allowed by the spec, but not very customary in CL implementations.

At the same time evaluation time of the test suite has gone down considerably too - not due to increased processing power, but due to improvements on both sides. One example of an improvement which has greatly benefitted ABCL's performance is the gradual elimination of specials is Maxima - an on-going effort in their team. On the other side, binding and unwinding specials has become much faster in ABCL too, reducing the impact of remaining excessive specials.

The last few tests to be fixed required adjustments to the Maxima test suite as well as fixes to ABCL. Thanks to everybody who helped achieve this result, most notably Robert Dodier, Hunter Monroe and Raymond Toy from the Maxima team as well as Ville Voutilainen and Mark Evenson from the ABCL team.