ACL2 Version 3.2 News

Table of Contents

Incremental Releases

We recommend that you consider using the latest incremental release, as it contains significant improvements.

Patches

From time to time we may release a patch file. Most users can probably get by pretty well without bothering to load a patch file.

Installation instructions appear at the top of the patch file. The "raw Lisp version" just below is one that can be loaded into raw Lisp but typically lacks some of the fixes in the "certifiable book" version.

Windows Installer

A Windows Installer for ACL2 is provided courtesy of Alex Spiridonov and Jared Davis. The download includes a Unix environment, pre-certified standard and workshop books, and a copy of Gnu Emacs.

Performance Comparisons

The following times were for the full ACL2 regression suite (distributed and workshop books). Not shown is a successful regression run on Windows using GCL 2.6.7.

In each case below, the first number, User time, is probably the most relevant for comparisons. The format is essentially:

         %Uuser %Ssystem %Eelapsed %PCPU (%Xtext+%Ddata %Mmax)k
         %Iinputs+%Ooutputs (%Fmajor+%Rminor)pagefaults %Wswaps

32-bit Linux times:

Each of the 32-bit Linux runs was on the same, almost surely unloaded machine running Debian GNU/Linux 2.6.19.1.

64-bit Linux times:

Each of the 64-bit Linux runs used four processors, "make -j 4 ...", on the same machine running Debian GNU/Linux 2.6.17.8. Note: Noah Friedman has observed that the difference in performance for CLISP is due to its bytecode-interpreted runtime vs. [for example] GCL's native object code execution.

Mac OS X times:

Each of the Macintosh runs was on the same unloaded Macintosh 2P G5 running Darwin Kernel Version 8.9.0 (Mac OS 10.4).

Sun/Solaris times:

Each of the Sun/Solaris runs was on the same Sun4u sparc machine running Solaris 2.9.

ACL2 Course Materials

At some point, perhaps "ACL2 Course Materials" will be a top-level link on the ACL2 home page. For now, we provide some links.