Benevolent Dictatorship

[Rodrigo Ventura]

>>>>> "Rainer" == Rainer Joswig <joswig@lavielle.com> writes:

    Rainer> How about providing an overview/comparison of existing systems? Guessing
    Rainer> might not be enough.

        I agree. My guessing comes from nothing else other than
personal experience with CMUCL. I was told many times how great CMUCL
was, but my personall experience told me otherwise, albeit repeated
attempts to grasp any issues that might have escaped me before. I have
tryed a few other freeware CL systems, and here goes my opinion:

        CLISP: by now, this is my favourite CL system. Very compact,
useful command-line editing, reasonably fast, nice GC, very solid, but
has feable support and doesn't seem to link well with external stuff.

        CMUCL: as I said before, I found it too heavy. Ok, it compiles
directly to assembly, and this is great for speed, but the GC is too
slow, it GC's too much. I think it's too huge to serve as a base for a
LispOS.

        GCL: Lightweight system, compiles to C (and uses gcc to make
.o's, which are directly and dynamically linkable to gcl, which is
nice), but doesn't seem to support the standard very well -- I never
liked that off-side sloop package to implement the _standard_ loop
macro. And it doesn't seem to be updated much often...

        ECL: I'm trying that one right now, it has the flavour of gcl
but seems to have more features. It also supports threads.

        I'm sure the survey of the comp.lang.lisp FAQ is rather
complete (updated?), so what we really need is a survey under the
light of the LispOS.

    Rainer> Currently CMU CL is the only choice for a CL-based system (IMHO).

        Why do you say "only"?

        Regards,

-- 
--

*** Rodrigo Martins de Matos Ventura, alias <Yoda>
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***   Instituto de Sistemas e Robotica, Polo de Lisboa
***    Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, Portugal
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