GNU Common Lisp - News: GCL 2.6.5 is released

GCL 2.6.5 is released

Item posted by Camm Maguire <camm> on Tue 17 Aug 2004 11:05:01 PM UTC.

The GCL team is happy to announce the release of version 2.6.5, the
latest achievement in the 'stable' series. This release is a minor
modification to version 2.6.4. From the changelog:

    * New gmp_wrappers.{c,h} files that prevent all GBC within gmp,
      obviating the need for gmp patches and a local gmp
      configure. FIXME -- extend to all gmp functions in a systematic
      way, and write header information for future use in the
      compiler, making sure that plt.c carries the needed gmp symbols
      at this point

    * dynsysgmp on by default; configure backs off to local gmp
      configure and build automatically if needed either because gmp
      not present or patched symbols are needed

    * autodetect and set the _start symbol when using gprof

    * Fix (setf (get ...) ...) return bug when interpreted

    * Fix overwrite end of sgc_type_map bug

    * Versioned depends on binutils-dev manually installed by Debian build process

As an example of the recent performance enhancements in GCL, Matt Kaufmann, one
of the ACL2 co-authors, reports significantly improved timings for the ACL2
regression suite.  When ACL2 2.8 was released, GCL was in pre-release mode for
2.6.2, and provided the following regression suite timings as reported on
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/v2-8/installation.html:

    * Gnu Common Lisp (GCL), Version 2.6.1-34 (unreleased):
      11005.520u  99.530s 3:10:45.33 97.0% 0+0k 0+0io 9555249pf+0w
    * Allegro Common Lisp, Version 6.2:
      12289.340u 134.340s 3:35:22.82 96.1% 0+0k 0+0io 9540266pf+0w
    * CMU Common Lisp (CMUCL), Version 18e:
      11303.590u 246.730s 3:29:11.40 92.0% 0+0k 0+0io 8906120pf+0w
    * Lispworks Common Lisp, Version 4.2.7:
      [No time available, but at one time was tested at about 72% slower than GCL.]
    CLISP, Version 2.33:
      52591u     611s    15:31       98%
    * Times above for CLISP are approximate [you don't want to know...]

Since version 2.6.3, a reasonably comparable calculation on the same machine
takes about 7800 user seconds (on a slightly updated ACL2).