- A proper solution involves deciding whether it's really worth
- saving space by implementing structure slot accessors as closures.
- (If it's not worth it, the problem vanishes automatically. If it
- is worth it, there are hacks we could use to force type tests to
- be compiled anyway, and even shared. E.g. we could implement
- an EQUAL hash table mapping from types to compiled type tests,
- and save the appropriate compiled type test as part of each lexical
- closure; or we could make the lexical closures be placeholders
- which overwrite their old definition as a lexical closure with
- a new compiled definition the first time that they're called.)
- As a workaround for the problem, #'(SETF FOO) expressions can
- be replaced with (EFFICIENT-SETF-FUNCTION FOO), where
+ To exercise the problem, compile and load
+ (cl:in-package :cl-user)
+ (defstruct foo
+ (bar (error "missing") :type bar))
+ (defvar *foo*)
+ (defun wastrel1 (x)
+ (loop (setf (foo-bar *foo*) x)))
+ (defstruct bar)
+ (defvar *bar* (make-bar))
+ (defvar *foo* (make-foo :bar *bar*))
+ (defvar *setf-foo-bar* #'(setf foo-bar))
+ (defun wastrel2 (x)
+ (loop (funcall *setf-foo-bar* x *foo*)))
+ then run (WASTREL1 *BAR*) or (WASTREL2 *BAR*), hit Ctrl-C, and
+ use BACKTRACE, to see it's spending all essentially all its time
+ in %TYPEP and VALUES-SPECIFIER-TYPE and so forth.
+ One possible solution would be simply to give up on
+ representing structure slot accessors as functions, and represent
+ them as macroexpansions instead. This can be inconvenient for users,
+ but it's not clear that it's worse than trying to help by expanding
+ into a horribly inefficient implementation.
+ As a workaround for the problem, #'(SETF FOO) expressions
+ can be replaced with (EFFICIENT-SETF-FUNCTION FOO), where