different alternatives for lispOS

[reti@wilson.ai.mit.edu]

    Date: Fri, 25 Apr 1997 15:01 EDT
    From: Kelly Murray <kem@Franz.COM>


    > What I want is Genera that runs on mac or pc hardware, commodity stuff.  I

    Might work ok, but I don't see it happening.  The new Symbolics can hardly
    get it to work on Alphas (maybe they just need a lot more help?)

It is working quite well on Alphas; most of the recent crop of problems were
due to Digital Unix changes, not Open Genera problems.

    It also really *is* old technology (e.g Flavors)
    and is a very complicated system, full of historical baggage.

However, it has features I use everyday (trap on call, trap on exit that works
when a frame is thrown through, locatives, reasonable performance in the face of
virtual memory, etc.) which no other available system has.

    Emulation will always perform poorly relative to native complilation,
    and it has little chance of being available on other platforms given
    the struggle to put it on just one(*).
    It also doesn't have real persistent objects.
    Statice is essentially a rdb with an o-o interface.

What systems do have real persistent objects?  I'd like to try one out.

    > remember people compaining about the mememory requirements of Genera (10MB

    It is certainly true that Genera with native Pentium compilation,
    could be cheap and effective, and useful today.  If it was available
    today for low-cost, I'd advocate using it.
    But IMO, this is looking backward, we need to look forward.

    -Kelly Edward Murray   (speaking for myself)

    (*) yes, I think multi-platform availability is desireable and should
    not be thrown away (why I think on top of Linux is a good start),
    but it's just not important in the beginning.
    What is critical is having useful, real-world solutions written
    in the language/system.