different alternatives for lispOS

[Christopher J. Vogt]

At 2:01 PM -0500 4/25/97, Kelly Murray wrote:
>> 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?)

I Don't know how many people are working at Symbolics these days, but I'll
bet it isn't many.  There are probably more former Symbolics employees at
Harlequin than there are current employees at Symbolics.

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

While it's true that Genera was originally built on Flavors, it supported
CLOS by the time I left Symbolics circa 1989.  There were tools to convert
flavors code to CLOS code (I don't know how much of the system was
converted), and CLOS isn't *THAT* different from flavors.  Further, I don't
know that I was specificly thinking of using actual Genera code, I was more
thinking of it as a functional model.  I certainly wouldn't want anything
that isn't native compiled.

[...]

Christopher (Chris) J. Vogt
mailto:vogt@novia.net
Omaha, NE
http://www.novia.net/~vogt/