two co-existing projects

[Alexey Goldin]

Forgive me my ignorance. I am watching this discussion with
fascination but there are a lot of thing I do not understand. I am not
a computer scientist but just a physics graduate student. In relation
to Lisp --- I am just a satisfied customer. Could anyone explain me
what VM is good for? Is it just a tribute to Java hype? Does anyone
seriously hope to replace Java VM with New(TM) and Improved(TM)
Virtual(TM) Machine(TM)?


What I would like is the Lisp enviroment, compilation to native code
(fast code! ), persistent object storage, consistent and simple
graphics. I would like to be able to use existing emacs (would it be
possible to run Emacs lisp easily?) and forgive me --- but I would
need to be able to call libraries written in Fortran/C/C++ (unless
someone rewrites LAPACK in LISP --- I doubt it will happen). Running
existing Unix stuff would be useful --- there is a lot of good stuff
that will be difficult to rewrite from the scratch. Someone told
stories about how good was integrated pager/garbage collector in Lisp
machines --- I would like it too. I would like to be able to hack
device for exotic devices like data acquisition boards. If I get a
reasonable subset of all this --- I will use this system, if all of
this --- I will use only it ;-)


Unfortunately I do not think I would be good at developing kernel
code, but count on me for bug reports ;-)

BTW, CMU CL is under pretty active development, check out
http://www.cons.org. Threads for CMU CL are being discussed and
probably will be added at some point.