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8.1 Overview

Unithread SBCL uses a shallow binding scheme: the current value of a symbol is stored directly in its value slot. Accessing specials is pretty fast but it's still a lot slower than accessing lexicals.

With multithreading it's slightly more complicated. The symbol's value slot contains the global value and each symbol has a TLS-INDEX slot that - when it's first bound - is set to a unique index of the thread local area reserved for this purpose. The tls index is initially zero and at index zero in the tls NO-TLS-VALUE-MARKER resides. NO-TLS-VALUE-MARKER is different from UNBOUND-MARKER to allow PROGV to bind a special to no value locally in a thread.