> I'm somewhat surprised that the FFT benchmark is written to use GC time, since normally I think of FFTs as not requiring any allocation at all, much less significant numbers of allocations of separate objects...
Keep in mind:
a) not every machine had FP hardware, so FP instructions might be emulated in software.
b) dealing with floating point numbers may mean allocate float objects. For example not every Lisp had a direct array of floats. The array then would be a general array pointing to float objects on the heap.
c) not every compiler/interpreter was clever enough to keep floats in registers (or similar) while doing float computations.
Even today, allocating floats can be a problem in Lisp applications.
Keep in mind:
a) not every machine had FP hardware, so FP instructions might be emulated in software.
b) dealing with floating point numbers may mean allocate float objects. For example not every Lisp had a direct array of floats. The array then would be a general array pointing to float objects on the heap.
c) not every compiler/interpreter was clever enough to keep floats in registers (or similar) while doing float computations.
Even today, allocating floats can be a problem in Lisp applications.