CMUCL and LispOS

[Peter.VanEynde]

Man, is this mailing list active!

On Mon, 28 Apr 1997, Mike McDonald wrote:

>   Right! Someone mentioned that the CMU-CL guys were talking about
> adding threads to CMU-CL. Let them do the compiler related things. In
> the meantime, we can get busy on our end of things, like the apps,
> file systems, network stacks, windowing systems, OS support/needs, ...
> There are plenty of other things to keep all of us busy while the
> compiler guys do their thing. When they're ready, we switch to CMU-CL.
> Maybe we'll have something done by then.

I can only agree. I try to maintain CMUCL for Linux, and it ain't easy to
find decent libraries to include. The main problem is the lack of a GUI.

I see people running around proclaiming that salvation will come from a
new VM for Lisp. Imagine that we work 2 years on CL (or EuLisp) on this
VM. Then we would be at the same place at now (maybe worse off): we would
have a working Lisp on all major systems. So what? The key to success
isn't perfection but infiltration. I see CMUCL as the basis for a LispOS
on the foundation of Linux, _making_ _it_ _easy_ to use old software.

We should use clisp _and_ CMUCL as the basis for a free-lisp standard,
adding libraries and making it easy to communicate with foreign lands.

Imagine that you could start up a CMUCL with a good GUI library (CLIM3 or
so), good interfaces to COBRA, Opendoc (if it still lives) and
OLE/DCOM/Name du jour. Top this off with a nice foreign function
interface. Make it runnable on Linux,*BSD,NT, and (included in the
plans for a free-clim, see cons.org) "dumb" NC's. _Then_ Lisp could be
used to slowly replace traditional programs. Then Lisp would be a
commercial alternative.

I propose to increase support to clisp and CMUCL (at the moment only 4 or
5 people are working on it), start work with the free-clim effort on a
next-generation GUI, and start coding libraries. Perl isn't successful
because of it nice VM, but because of the ease of integration and the
large multitude of libraries. Don't get pinned down on the word OS !

Oh, and multithreading on CMUCL is not here yet because of a lack of time
and people, not because it's impossible.

Don't throw CMUCL out the window just because it runs on UNIX :-).

Groetjes, Peter

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