Re: [Sbcl-help] FLEXI-STREAMS optimization mysteries

[Christophe R. <cs...@ca...>]

Anton Vodonosov <vod...@ma...> writes:

> Is there some good books to read to get understanding of how Common Lisp
> implementation may work, enough to have more or less right expectations 
> about
> different language constructs performance?
>
> For example, I'm quite surprised by the fact, that CLOS dispatch outperforms
> direct funcalling a closure stored in a slot of class. I.e.
>   [...]
> Also interesting that CLOS dispatch is as if insensitive to class hierarchy
> complexity and to number of methods it should choose from.

For this, you could read "Efficient Method Dispatch in PCL" by
Kiczales and Rodriguez, which explains some of the strategies.
(There's also some detail about them in the SBCL internals manual).

> Another surprise for me is SBCL garbage collector.

There are some papers linked from
<http://sbcl-internals.cliki.net/Papers>; to understand how garbage
collection algorithms can vary, you might want to read Wilson's
bigsurv.ps or the book by Jones and Lins.

Cheers,

Christophe