"allocate-vector" not defined since sbcl-2.1.5

[Qian Yun]

"SB-KERNEL:ALLOCATE-VECTOR" is not defined since sbcl-2.1.5,
to be precise, it is this commit:
https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/commit/3203ba3ac5f2c3d59c25825c90fb6e8d637e8af8

Clearly this would affect FriCAS's performance.

Not sure if this is a sbcl bug, I'll report on their mail list.

- Qian

[Qian Yun]

So the sbcl maintainers say why not use "make-array" directly.

So the usage of sbcl internals was to speed up "make-array".
They were added in the past to speed up old version of sbcl
Now I wonder if our current pile of code still matters.

- Qian

[Waldek Hebisch]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 09:12:42PM +0800, Qian Yun wrote:
> "SB-KERNEL:ALLOCATE-VECTOR" is not defined since sbcl-2.1.5,
> to be precise, it is this commit:
> https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/commit/3203ba3ac5f2c3d59c25825c90fb6e8d637e8af8
>
> Clearly this would affect FriCAS's performance.

This is handled by our code: in relevant case also other functions
are missing, we detect this and revert to generic method.

Concerning performance: in older sbcl 'make-array' for specialized
arrays had really bad performance, so our code was really important.
In newer sbcl 'make-array' is faster, so using it is no so bad...

--
Waldek Hebisch