Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!unsvax!jimi!tahoe!apple!mikel
From: mikel@Apple.COM (Mikel Evins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Allegro Lisp
Message-ID: <46995@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 1 Dec 90 01:36:52 GMT
References: <12137@life.ai.mit.edu>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 54

In article <12137@life.ai.mit.edu> caroma@ai.mit.edu writes:
>Another question: How does this environment compare to, say, Coral's
>Common lisp for the Mac, now distributed by Apple?  (I heard a rumor
>that it ran about 30 times slower...)  Is it well integrated with the
>NeXT?  Is it a LispM-like environment?

Firt of all, let me say right up front that I do *not* speak
for Apple Computer, Inc. on this matter. Furthermore, speaking
purely as a Mac enthusiast *and* a NeXT enthusiast, I intend
to give you my *personal* opinion about the two Lisps.

I use Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp every day at work. I love it.
It is my primary development environment, and, so long as I
am developing on the Mac, I prefer it that way.

I bought a old-style NeXT cube partly because of the possibility
that Lisp wouldn't be bundled with the new machines. Thus,
I have Franz's Allegro Common Lisp on the NeXT. I have been
frankly disappointed so far. I really had wanted to use the Lisp
on the NeXT, but it just isn't well enough integrated with
the machine's system software. On the Mac you can just evaluate
(oneof *window*) and get a window on the screen. Menus, dialog
boxes, and other interface elements are similarly accessible.

On the NeXT, there is a rather clumsy interface between Lisp
and Interface Builder through foreign function calls. It seems
to work, but is not anything like as convenient as the interface
control on the Mac.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love my NeXT. It is my machine of
choice when I go home for the day. I use my NeXT cube probably
five times as much as the Mac II cx I have at home. I love
Interface Builder. It is actually more convenient in some ways 
than the development tools in Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp.
However, I wouldn't choose Franz's Lisp and Interface Builder
in their present forms as my primary development environment.
Right now IB and Objective-C are definitely my tools of choice.
(And what am I developing? Why, a Lisp programming environment,
of course. Lisp is still my first choice in languages, so,
my solution to the problem is to write one).

As for performance, my tests indicate that Franz's product
is around 27% faster than MACL running on a Mac IIcx, or
about half the speed of MACL running on a Mac IIfx. (This
assumes the Gabriel benchmarks, Franz's product running on
a NeXT N1000 cube with system software 1.0).

In short, I would prefer to use Lisp as my primary development
platform on any machine. So far, I don't feel that I
can do that on the NeXT, so I use Objective-C instead. Performance
probably isn't as bad as you have heard, but it isn't
a barn-burner either. Maybe it will be better in 3.1, or
maybe NeXT System Software 2.0 will improve performance 
significantly.