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6.1 Things Which Might Be In The Next ANSI Standard

SBCL provides extensive support for calling external C code, Foreign Function Interface.

SBCL provides additional garbage collection functionality not specified by ANSI. Weak pointers allow references to objects to be maintained without keeping them from being GCed (garbage collected). And “finalization” hooks are available to cause code to be executed when an object has been GCed.

SBCL supports Gray streams, user-overloadable CLOS classes whose instances can be used as Lisp streams (e.g. passed as the first argument to format). Additionally, the bundled contrib module sb-simple-streams implements a subset of the Franz Allegro simple-streams proposal.

SBCL supports a MetaObject Protocol which is intended to be compatible with AMOP; present exceptions to this (as distinct from current bugs) are: