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From: espen@math.uio.no (Espen J. Vestre)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Looking for KCL on MIPS & AKCL.
Message-ID: <1990Nov2.094418.9391@ulrik.uio.no>
Date: 2 Nov 90 09:44:18 GMT
Sender: news@ulrik.uio.no (USENET News System)
Organization: Department of Mathematics, Univ. of Oslo
Lines: 45
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> <3685@skye.ed.ac.uk>

In article <3685@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
> 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.

I can see your point.  But isn't it sometimes better to telnet to a 
machine running a better lisp implementation?
The reason I looked into AKCL was somewhat different - I wanted to make 
sure that my MACL program was portable to other CLs.  I wasn't able to run 
it, however ("value stack overflow", could this be corrected by setting up 
AKCL in another way?).  
Luckily, I discovered that I was able to "borrow" a NeXt by telnetting to 
it (And NeXts come bundled with Allegro CL as you may know).

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

Yes! And very good code as well!

> 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.

This reminds me of another question I have:  Why on earth are these 
systems so large??  Compare it with Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp again:  
Although it includes a very fast and very good compiler, a nice 
backtracer, an editor and lots of other goodies, it doesn't need more than 
2MBs of memory to run properly (for instance the program that I couldn't 
get AKCL to load).  For small programs, the memory need is even smaller:  
The system itself needs only about 800K.

-----------------------------------------
Espen J. Vestre                 
Department of Mathematics
University of Oslo
P.o. Box 1053 Blindern
N-0316 OSLO 3
NORWAY                            espen@math.uio.no
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