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CLisp's Suprising Results

I've moved all my web sites to Lisp source code and use LML to create the XHTML files for the web site. Using Common Lisp Controller, it's easy for me to test LML on a large number of CL implementations. As usual, testing LML on multiple platforms revealed that my code relied on some non-ANSI CL functionality of particular implementations. In the process of testing on multiple implementations, I found those instances of non-ANSI code and now have nice, portable code as a result.

I then ran a benchmark to compare the speed of implementations for this particular application. What surprised me is how well CLisp performed. CLisp, as opposed to other implementations, compiles to platform-independent byte-code rather than the native code of the CPU. In the benchmark results that I posted, Clisp performs brillantly. And, since CLisp works on nearly all CPU platforms that have a C-compiler, it's a good choice for me since I run Debian GNU/Linux on multiple CPU platforms.

To be fair to the other CL implemenations, my web site generation benchmark uses mostly uncompiled source (LML) code as the input. I believe that SBCL, in particular, spends a lot of time working on compiling the code before executing it.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on September 26, 2002 11:32 AM.

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