Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!hplabs!hpfcso!hpfcdj!jayavant
From: jayavant@hpfcdj.HP.COM (Rajeev Jayavant)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Common Lisp?
Message-ID: <17190006@hpfcdj.HP.COM>
Date: 2 Jul 90 17:20:42 GMT
References: <23200@snow-white.udel.EDU>
Organization: Hewlett Packard -- Fort Collins, CO
Lines: 34

/ hpfcdj:comp.sys.amiga / marsella@athos.rutgers.edu (Stacy Marsella) /  1:11 pm  Jun 29, 1990 /

>> With regard to a Common Lisp for the Amiga, has anyone tried porting
>> Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) ?  I suspect this point has been mentionned
>> before but in case it hasn't - KCL is a public domain common lisp, written
>> in C for various platforms (e.g. SYSV Unix and BSD unix).  Not having
>> looked at the code, I have no idea how plausible a port to the Amiga is, but
>>it may be an interesting place to start. 
...
>> S. Marsella

I have played around with the internals of KCL quite a bit (on Sun3's,
VaXes, and HP's) and wouldn't really enjoy porting it to AmigaDOS.
The major problem is that the memory allocation routines and garbage
collector would have to be essentially rewritten to handle
non-contiguous memory segments.

If you want to be able to load compiled object files, some sort of
AmigaDos-compatible dynamic linker would have to be written.  And
finally, if you want to be able to dump out a Lisp image with all of
the system modules preloaded, we need to create a way to dump an
executable and its data structures from memory into a disk file.  It's
not impossible, but it's definitely not as simple as creating a new
defs file and typing "make".

One other drawback of KCL: on all three Unix platforms I've used, a
dumped executable containing just the system files and compiler is on
the order of four megabytes.  Note that the compiler only produces C
code, which means you also need to have the C compiler around and have
enough RAM left over for it to run concurrently with KCL.
							Rajeev
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rajeev Jayavant (rajeev@hpfcla.hp.com)
Hewlett Packard - Graphics Technology Division