Bolla says that alioth blew it, by not asking SBCL for full optimization --- and he does in fact get different timing with the optimization in place.

From the original post:

    N=500
    gcc 0.15u 0.00s 0.17r
    sbcl 0.08u 0.02s 0.21r

    N=3000
    gcc 5.60u 0.00s 5.69r
    sbcl 5.18u 0.01s 5.41r

    N=5500
    gcc 18.81u 0.01s 19.12r
    sbcl 17.42u 0.02s 17.76r

I mentioned the alioth page mainly so people could see how gcc was being run.

>>Bolla says that alioth blew it, by not asking SBCL for full optimization<<

No he doesn't.

The spectral-norm Lisp SBCL #2 program is Lorenzo Bolla's program - look at the program source code

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=spect...

>>he does in fact get different timing with the optimization in place<<

He get's different timing but the only explanation he provides is "So, different numbers on different boxes, which is not at all unexpected."

>>Bolla says that alioth blew it, by not asking SBCL for full optimization<<

Maybe you should ask Lorenzo Bolla if he was trying to create misunderstanding by posting one of his old (December 5th, 2010) blog entries to HN ;-)

The benchmarks game website has been showing Lorenzo Bolla's spectral-norm Lisp SBCL #2 since December 8th 2010.