Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Looking for KCL on MIPS & AKCL.
Message-ID: <3685@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Nov 90 15:10:26 GMT
References: <1990Oct22.203128.8763@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1990Oct26.122649.7033@cs.nott.ac.uk> <1990Oct26.123828.7308@cs.nott.ac.uk> <1990Oct31.155432.16911@ulrik.uio.no>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 41

In article <1990Oct31.155432.16911@ulrik.uio.no> espen@math.uio.no (Espen J. Vestre) writes:
>Just curious:
>Are there any people using AKCL for serious purposes? 

Yes.

>I just find it funny that people are asking for AKCL on all these
>fancy machines - the cost of one of the fine commercial lisps is
>probably usually minor compared to the hardware costs involved.

Just because you can get the machine, one way or another, doesn't
mean you have enough money for commercial Lisp systems too.  For
example, most of the people I work with use Suns, but the person
who shares my office has a MIPS workstation.  We have no plans to
buy a commercial Lisp for it, because it won't be used in any
Lisp-based projects.  We also have a Sequent which is primarily
used for parallel Prolog work.  The fastest way to get a Lisp on
it was to port KCl.

>It's not that I don't like pd programs, it's just that I tried a small 
>program I have that does some runtime compiling when loading, and I found 
>out that the the AKCL compiler is several times slower on a decstation 
>3100 than the MACL compiler on the tiny-and-usually-regarded-a-toy 
>Macintosh SE!! (hw+sw costs about $2000...)

The main time cost is usually the C compiler.  KCL compiles Lisp by
emitting C.  Some C compilers can be very slow, at least on the files
emitted by KCL.  GCC seems rather fast, but there will always be
some extra cost when compilation follows such an indirect route.

(You also have to compare like with like.  Does the MACL compiler
compile to native code?)

>It must be a pain to develop software with it.

Sometimes.  But it's smaller than the commercial Common Lisps I've
tried.  So, on machines like an 8 meg SPARCstation, it can be much
easier to use, because it doesn't spend so much time paging.  For
large programs, though, this advantage may be lost.

-- Jeff