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From: mthome@BBN.COM (Mike Thome)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.clos
Subject: Re: CLOS' popularity
Message-ID: <9105231827.AA13039@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 23 May 91 17:27:05 GMT
References: <9105231427.AA09586@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu>
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Organization: CommonLoops
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>>> 3. Memory hog.  The base development image for Sun Common LISP takes
>>> 14 MB!  While there are tools for reducing delivery image size, the
>>> results are still much larger than a comparable C program.

>> This is indeed a major pain.

>I think LISP can learn a lot from C, but what is a comparable C program to
>Sun Common LISP?  What are we willing to leave out to make it smaller?

How about Saber's C++ development environment?  After all, you get a
great deal in that 14 MB: i.e. compiler, interpreter, and debugger as
well as the standard lisp "runtime library".  So how much different is
this from a C++ environment?  Well, on my local Sun 4: hello.c
compiles to about 24K... But lets be fair and count the shared libc.a
(at 500K).  Now for the rest of a C++ environment: g++ (160K), cc1plus
(2608K), asparc (280K), ld++ (232K), gdb (1120K), make (312K), and
libg++.a (> 1024K).  Sum 'em up and: 6260K without an interpreter.
Now 1/2 the equivalent minimum size isn't bad, and you would still end
up with a 24K binary (+ however much of the 500K lib needed to run),
but we are most certainly not seeing (the commonly perceived) several
orders of magnitude of difference between *truly* comparable C and
Lisp programs.

cheers,
	-mik (mthome@bbn.com)