This message is about how important DECLARE and THE are. If you do not handle DECLARE and THE right, people will laugh at native-compile. Here is an SBCL transcript. I am running on a $100 Lenovo Chromebook. I got SBCL with the command sudo apt-get install sbcl. * (declaim (optimize (safety 0) (speed 3) (debug 0))) NIL * (defun foo-with-declare (n) (let ((i 0) (sum 0) (max (expt 10 n))) (declare (fixnum i sum max)) (loop (cond ((<= i max) (setq sum (the fixnum (+ sum i)))) (t (return sum))) (incf i)))) FOO-WITH-DECLARE * (time (foo-with-declare 8)) Evaluation took: 0.125 seconds of real time 0.123203 seconds of total run time (0.123193 user, 0.000010 system) 98.40% CPU 135,905,516 processor cycles 0 bytes consed 5000000050000000 * (defun foo-without-declare (n) (let ((i 0) (sum 0) (max (expt 10 n))) (loop (cond ((<= i max) (setq sum (+ sum i))) (t (return sum))) (incf i)))) WARNING: redefining COMMON-LISP-USER::FOO-WITHOUT-DECLARE in DEFUN FOO-WITHOUT-DECLARE * (time (foo-without-declare 8)) Evaluation took: 1.080 seconds of real time 1.072932 seconds of total run time (1.072932 user, 0.000000 system) 99.35% CPU 1,181,369,303 processor cycles 0 bytes consed 5000000050000000 People go wow about 8X. How does native-compile do? There is a great song by Alabama 'If you gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band'. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6r4E514nJg Bob Bob On Sun, Feb 18, 2024 at 3:28 PM Andreas Schwab wrote: > On Feb 18 2024, Robert Boyer wrote: > > > Furthermore, such declare forms are necessary for life as we know it > > in the free world, so that fixnum arithmetic can be used where > > appropriate! > > If you are programming in Emacs Lisp, you need to follow the rules of > Emacs Lisp. > > -- > Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org > GPG Key fingerprint = 7578 EB47 D4E5 4D69 2510 2552 DF73 E780 A9DA AEC1 > "And now for something completely different." > -- Anything I seem to state should be taken as a question. I am at least 77 and feeble.