John Connors  <johnc@yagc.ndo.co.uk> wrote:
+---------------
| I'm looking for a book (or articles) that will help me understand the
| techniques used in a modern (cf SBCL/CMUCL) lisp compiler. ...
| I'm more interested in low level issues like linking - or whatever
| the lisp equivalent is, symbol table and
| freestore management and garbage collection...
+---------------

You might want to look at "Design of CMU Common Lisp", edited
by Robert A. MacLachlan (2003), which can be found in the
CMUCL distribution, or here:

    http://common-lisp.net/project/cmucl/doc/CMUCL-design.pdf

While incomplete in many places [despite its 122 pages], if you're
generally familiar with compiler design you may find it interesting.
It does at least cover all of the major phases of the compiler, and
discusses a number of the optimizations used. You will probably need
a copy of the CMUCL sources at hand to make much sense of it, though.
[The CMUCL compiler is written extirely in CMUCL, except for a *very*
small amount of C & assembler.]


-Rob

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