
Starting to Hack on Steel Bank Common Lisp - avodonosov
http://www.pvk.ca/Blog/2013/04/13/starting-to-hack-on-sbcl/
======
rayiner
SBCL is really amazing. Even though it's "bog standard" 1970's and 1980's
technology, it still puts up a great showing against state of the art
compilers: <http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/lisp.php>.

It's also a great example of the power of macros. If you look at the backend,
things like define-vop and the like, it does a lot of things using macros that
e.g. LLVM uses an external code generation tool (tblgen) to accomplish.

~~~
mmp
No offense, but I'm not sure that the Language Shootout is the best showcase,
the SBCL code submitted there could hardly be called idiomatic Common Lisp.
Mandelbrot is one of the most egrerious offenders in that regard [1], compare
that with the Java submission [2] which is both cleaner and faster...

[1][http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=mandelbrot&lang=sbcl&id=1)

[2][http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=nbody&lang=java&id=2)

~~~
emiljbs
When the text of a post is greyed out, has it then received a bunch of
downvotes?

// From a HN newbie who's already wondered this

~~~
adbge
It has received more downvotes than upvotes.

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Derbasti
Funny. Chance has it that I am right now working my way through "Practical
Common Lisp" and rather enjoying Common Lisps bag of tricks. We'll see if I
will dive deep enough to start hacking on the compiler itself. Once I go
there, this post will be an awesome resource though.

~~~
muhbaasu
I already read PCL and imho it's a really great book. In case, however, you
have further questions (like I did) have a look at #lisp on irc.freenode.org -
the guys there are really nice and helpful.

