Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!att!ihlpf!jdu
From: jdu@ihlpf.ATT.COM (John Unruh, NY9R)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Unix Lisp Environments (why the slow evolution)
Message-ID: <8585@ihlpf.ATT.COM>
Date: 25 May 89 12:09:05 GMT
References: <31670@sri-unix.SRI.COM> <469@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: jdu@ihlpf.UUCP (55224-Unruh,J.D.)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 31

In article <469@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>I guess some of the Unix Lisp vendors are under commercial pressure to
>make Lisp fit better with conventional languages and conventional ways
>of doing things rather than make systems for Lisp hackers (such hackers
>being in limited supply).  There is often also a strong negative reaction
>to Lisp systems that are many megabytes in size.  To some extent this is
>unfair, because calculations of the size of C systems tend to omit all
>the things C gets "free" from Unix, but it is not completely unfair.
>

There is one big distinction between the things C programmers get from
the UNIX (R) Operating System and what a LISP programmer gets from a
good LISP system.  Ususally the tools used for C programming reside on
the disk except for the moments when they are in use (modulo the sticky
bit).  If a tool (especially a large one) is used in a LISP image, it
increases the size of the LISP image's virtual memory.  If the LISP
implementation is good at saving memory, programmers tools will be
autoloading files of some sort, or at least not be bound into the image
in such a way that every delivery system must have them.

Many machines have limits on the maximum process size, and have problems
with really big processes.  This may be an artifact of how conventional
programming languages work.  Most C programs are fairly small, and the
environment is not integrated in the same way as a Lisp machine, so the
whole thing tends to be less memory intensive.
-- 
                               John Unruh
                               AT&T-Bell Laboratories
                               att!ihlpf!jdu
                               (312)979-6765