Steel Bank Common Lisp 2.6.7 Review

Executive Summary

• Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7 offers improved performance and new features.
• The community is discussing potential use cases and optimizations for Lisp in modern computing environments.
• Developers are working on improving documentation and support for various platforms.

The Buzz Score

The Internet’s Verdict: 70% Hyped, 30% Skeptical

Community Feedback

Users are excited about the new features and performance improvements in SBCL 2.6.7.

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.

However, some users are requesting better documentation and support for certain features.

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.

Technical Updates

The SB-SIMD contrib now supports ARM64 and AVX512 instructions are supported on X86-64.

            * 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 updates are expected to improve performance and provide more options for developers.

Focus Keyword: SBCL 2.6.7