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From: welch@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arun Welch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: ENVOS COMMON LISP
Message-ID: <39642@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 16 Mar 89 16:51:34 GMT
References: <7237@siemens.UUCP>
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In article <7237@siemens.UUCP>, neeraj@demon.siemens.com (Neeraj Bhatnagar) writes:
> 
> I have recently been using Medley 1.0 release of the 
> COMMON LISP environment from the ENVOS corporation. So far I have
> been very disappointed by the performance of the system. 
> 

Well, for starters, you really ought to use some real benchmarks.
While lisp has changed some since they first came out, out, the
Gabriels are still the standard for lisp systems. 

On another front, the performance on the sun can be affected by a lot
of things, which dont affect the Mac. For example,
How many other processes were going on on the Sun?
Did it have a local disk, or was it swapping across the net? 
Was the emulator and the vmem file on the local disk, or off on the
net somewhere?
How fast was the disk, if local?

There are a bunch of other reasons why you're comparing apples and
oranges, like how much time was spend in GC by the Sun (does Coral
have a GC?), the fact that Coral runs only in core, while the Sun was
using a virtual memory, etc.


Also, realise that the Envos product is not running 'native' on the
sun, but rather running an emulator of the Xerox dmachine
microcode.  Yup, this is gonna result in a bit of a performance hit.
Numbers I'be heard are that a Sun 3/60 with 8M is ~ the speed of a
dandelion, but there are so many variables that the number is pretty
meaningless. I can come up with the timings on a Dove, but not from
your benchmark (not having an SE with Coral to time it against). 

The other major difference, which can't be measured by any benchmarks,
is the difference in environments.  Unfortunately, there's no way to
quantise a Lisp programming environment other than the fact that
programmer A can produce more code on environment B than on
environment C.  What those of us working on the Envos platform enjoy
is the rich environment, providing lots of tools for writing,
debuging, and so on. 

I'll also admit that I'm biased. I happen to *like* the Envos
environment. 

...arun


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Arun Welch
Lisp Systems Programmer, Lab for AI Research, Ohio State University
welch@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu