FW: [Gcl-devel] Floating-point performance of GCL? Bug?

[Mike Thomas]

Woops, I used an underscore rather than a hyphen.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Thomas [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Monday, 19 July 2004 6:03 PM
To: address@hidden
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: [Gcl-devel] Floating-point performance of GCL? Bug?


Hi Nicholas.

Thanks for your enquiry about the suitability of GCL for Femlisp and also
for your bug report.

I think a speedy reply to your message has been the victim of ISP problems
for our chief programmer and optimizer, Camm Maguire.

Looking at your problem on the weekend under Windows XP I reproduced the
crash with the old stable release GCL 2.6.2 but not with CVS HEAD GCL or
with the recently released stable GCL 2.6.3.

There's two consecutive runs on a 2.4 GHz, 512 Mb P4 Windows XP box using
GCL 2.6.3, below.  My DAXPY results are woeful compared with your own.
Windows GCL has substantially different memory management to the Unix
platforms however.

I feel safe in saying that we would like to ensure that GCL meets your needs
with Femlisp as there is a tendency for GCL to be used in mathematical
applications and Camm, Vadim, Dave, myself and probably many others on this
list are also interested in those uses.

Possibly the greatest obstacle for you at this point will be ANSI
compatibility.  We are rapidly moving towards that goal for the next major
version stable release (2.7.0) and I believe that Femlisp will be an
excellent test case to that end.

In particular, Michael Koehne has been recently been developing the low
level functionality required to support ASDF - a prerequisite for Femlisp.
Both he and Camm have been also been considering ways to improve the
performance of our CLOS implementation, PCL, which I understand is also
important to the operation of Femlisp.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.

========================================================================
GCL (GNU Common Lisp)  2.6.3 ANSI   Jul 19 2004 15:11:02
Source License: LGPL(gcl,gmp), GPL(unexec,bfd)
Binary License:  GPL due to GPL'ed components: (UNEXEC)
Modifications of this banner must retain notice of a compatible license
Dedicated to the memory of W. Schelter

Use (help) to get some basic information on how to use GCL.
>(load (compile-file
"c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.lisp"
))

Compiling c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.lisp.
Warning:
The OPTIMIZE quality DEBUG is unknown.
Warning:
The OPTIMIZE quality DEBUG is unknown.
End of Pass 1.
End of Pass 2.
OPTIMIZE levels: Safety=0 (No runtime error checking), Space=0, Speed=3
Finished compiling
c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.lisp.
Loading c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.o
DDOT-long: 205.83 MFLOPS
DDOT-short: 577.80 MFLOPS
DAXPY-long: 10.40 MFLOPS
DAXPY-short: 11.98 MFLOPS
start address -T 10141000 Finished loading
c:/data/down/programming/languages/co
mmon-lisp/mflop.o
1712

>(load (compile-file
"c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.lisp"
))

Compiling c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.lisp.
Warning:
The OPTIMIZE quality DEBUG is unknown.
Warning:
The OPTIMIZE quality DEBUG is unknown.
End of Pass 1.
End of Pass 2.
OPTIMIZE levels: Safety=0 (No runtime error checking), Space=0, Speed=3
Finished compiling
c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.lisp.
Loading c:/data/down/programming/languages/common-lisp/mflop.o
DDOT-long: 204.52 MFLOPS
DDOT-short: 575.22 MFLOPS
DAXPY-long: 11.00 MFLOPS
DAXPY-short: 13.03 MFLOPS
start address -T 101403f0 Finished loading
c:/data/down/programming/languages/co
mmon-lisp/mflop.o
1712