LispOS and C

[Harvey J. Stein]

Fare Rideau writes:
 > Marcus G. Daniels said that he wished GCC to be ported to LispOS;
 > Harvey J. Stein and Lars Thomas Hansen considered Lisp/Scheme compilers
 > that produce C code as potential (wishable or not) compilers
 > for use in LispOS.
 > 
 > Well, in all those cases, they forget something *essential*:
 > the memory model of LispOS, with its GC and orthogonal persistent store.
 > Unless the C code is carefully written with just that in mind,
 > output by GCC will not comply to to the memory model of LispOS,
 > hence be unusable under LispOS, unless a unix/whatever emulator is used
 > (which might be the underlying OS, or a OS concurrently running on
 > the same microkernel, or a full-fledged emulation box written for LispOS).

I don't follow you.  Every system I mentioned compiles arbitrary
scheme programs to C, which can then be compiled & can run under unix
(and other systems).  Being scheme, they all include garbage
collectors.  Why is this so different from CMUCL?  What's the big deal
that there's intermediate code in the compilation process which
happens to be C as opposed to directly outputing x86 machine code?
And some of them are mostly themselves implemented in scheme (rscheme
and gambit, if I'm not mistaken).

-- 
Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
abel@netvision.net.il