Benevolent Dictatorship

[Rainer Joswig]

At 14:57 Uhr +0100 20.03.1998, Rodrigo Ventura wrote:

>        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.

CLISP is very useful.

Has "only" a byte-code compiler. Really big
applications might be "slow". Doesn't really
try to be ANSI CL compatible. Further development is a bit slow now
(Bruno Haible stepped aside)? 

>        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.

People are working to improve GC (by having a generational GC).

When it comes to size, I don't care about that too much nowadays.
My home PC has 128 MB RAM, my next Laptop will have > 200 if
possible. RAM is cheap these days. Don't waste memory if
not necessary, but this is not my primary concern these days.

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

Seemed to be to buggy to me.

>        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.

There was/is source for a Common Lisp system from BBN in the
CMU archive.

Then there is WCL (old).  

>    Rainer> Currently CMU CL is the only choice for a CL-based system (IMHO).
>
>        Why do you say "only"?

Because it is the only system with a native code compiler.
And some people are still hacking with CMU CL.


But actually for applications I don't care where my stuff runs.
I want it portable. I'm using Mac OS, Genera, Windows and
Solaris. I want to run my code on all these platforms.
ANSI CL is the language, CLIM is the UIMS and CL-HTTP is
the network. I'd rather not like to write unportable code
(Well, sometimes, ...). So if there is a new CL-based
Emacs for example, I want it portable. A one platform only version
does not make sense to me. Eventually the Lisp OS may give
a nice overall integrated environment - but until
this happens applications can already be written.

Rainer Joswig

Rainer Joswig, Lavielle EDV Systemberatung GmbH & Co, Lotharstrasse 2b, D22041
Hamburg, Tel: +49 40 658088, Fax: +49 40 65808-202,
Email: joswig@lavielle.com , WWW: http://www.lavielle.com/~joswig/