Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) 2.6.7 Released with New Module, Platform Support, and Fixes

New Manual Module and Documentation

SBCL 2.6.7 introduces the new SB-MANUAL contrib module, which embeds the SBCL manual within docstrings of section definitions. This allows for interactive exploration of the manual using standard Lisp tools like Slime's M-. and browsing with the MGL-PAX library. Additionally, the release includes fixes for documentation typos and clarifies that arrays in the foreign function interface are row-major.

Expanded Platform Support

The update enhances platform compatibility, with the SB-SIMD contrib now supporting ARM64. AVX512 instructions are also supported on X86-64, alongside additional SIMD instruction support for both ARM64 and X86-64 architectures. A miscompilation bug for SAP-REF-N on ARM64 has been fixed, and INTEGER-LENGTH is now implemented without a loop on MIPS and LoongArch for primitive types.

Bug Fixes and Optimizations

Several bugs have been addressed, including warnings emitted when READing with *READ-SUPPRESS* T, compiler type errors with CONCATENATE and non-sequence arguments, and incorrect handling of (EQL <complex>) types. Improvements were made to the handling of quiet NaN inputs to LOG, and a miscompilation of MULTIPLE-VALUE-CALL was resolved. The release also includes optimizations such as passing constant complex numbers to local functions without consing, enhanced SIMD routines for UTF-8 conversions, and improved compiler transformations for COUNT and SB-ALIEN:DEREF. The sparse set implementation in the compiler has been tuned for better performance.