[Maxima] A lisp oriented question - interning symbols for use in Maxima

[Raymond Toy]

Žiga Lenarčič wrote:
> On a side note, is there any interest for a foreign library interface  
> in Maxima? Of course it works only in CFFI supported lisps, so no GCL  
> support, sorry. I quickly compared the calling overhead by importing  
>   
AFAIK, gcl is a requirement.  If it weren't an FFI would have been added
years ago.
> the C function 'rand()' from 'libc' and compared it to Maxima's  
> function 'random' - calling C function from Maxima was faster, so I  
> guess the overhead is quite small (on SBCL at least).
>   
It's pretty hard to measure just call overhead.  If you timed the
elapsed time, then the comparison is pretty much useless since it's
unlikely rand() and random are even remotely the same.

Ray