Efficient Method Dispatch in PCL

Efficient implementation of CLOS is critical to its success as a standard. Some excellent work on Lisp Machines [3, 7] has demonstrated clearly that CLOS can be implemented efficiently using special-purpose hardware. We describe a mechanism for implementing CLOS method dispatch efficiently on stock hardware, in the current generation of Common Lisp implementations. This mechanism is implemented in the newest version of PCL, a portable implementation of CLOS, and runs in more than ten Common Lisps.


© Copyright 1991 Association for Computing Machinery

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.


Download paper.