declarations

[amb@rascal.ics.UTEXAS.EDU (Michael Ballantyne)]

Schelter has added a new tool to AKCL which facilitates 
tracking down poor declarations---especially in large,
multi-file programs. Using his "gprof" (see gprof.lisp in "lsp")
facility, you can
build a version of AKCL which will trace invocations of those
routines that get laid down when the compiler does not have
enough information to use the optimal C construct. gprof will tell
you the invoking routine so you can go back through your code and
look at those calls which were invoked enough times to warrant the
attention.


The most recent versions of AKCL have a new, improved method
of doing structs which makes the use ofproclamations very
important when using defstruct. The previous version of defstruct
boxed up all numeric values. THis is no longer the case. AKCL's
defstruct and C's struct are now essentially the same---you can easily
lay a lisp struct and a c struct on top of one another and access
the fields with the respective accessors.

You should all be using the most recent version of AKCL (1.175). Be warned
that you will probably have to recompile all your programs. You will
certainly have to recompile code that uses defstruct.