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Does sbcl consider whether a function has side-effects when optimizing?

I have recently been reading the SBCL User Manual and started wondering about the title question. Obviously some lisps, for example clojure, ban all side effects so they can easily parallelize the code. Common Lisp allows side effects and so I was wondering if the fact a given function is 'dirty' or 'clean' affects it's compilation.

For example in the CMUCL compiler manual let optimizations show how, in many casesm the use of 'let' to bind a new variable will be more efficient than modifying with 'setq'. I guess I'm asking if something similar is done for function calls.

I have read the relevant sections of the sbcl manual and poured through the question on stackoverflow but could not find an answer to this.

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Baggers Avatar asked Jul 15 '13 09:07

Baggers


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1 Answers

short: Not faster. Sometimes actually slower.

long:

According to Stas Boukarev from SBCL-devel,

SBCL doesn't even know that a function has no side effects, so, no. Besides, most of the time having side effects is the most optimal way.

I am aware of the fact that functions such as nreverse, which are destructive, tend to be faster than nondestructive functions (in this case reverse is the nondestructive version). They also come with many setbacks. As Peter Siebel put it:

Each recycling function is a loaded gun pointed footward.

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Spenser Truex Avatar answered Oct 03 '22 09:10

Spenser Truex