Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!arisia!mark
From: mark@arisia.Xerox.COM (Mark Weiser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Xerox PARC's Cedar (garbage collection)
Summary: How to find more about Cedar on popular machines
Keywords: Cedar, SIGPLAN, SOSP
Message-ID: <832@arisia.Xerox.COM>
Date: 30 May 89 06:58:45 GMT
References: <460002@hpbsla.HP.COM> <11735@well.UUCP> <41977@oliveb.olivetti.com> <2248@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu>
Reply-To: weiser.pa@xerox.com (Mark Weiser)
Organization: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Lines: 9

We have recently at PARC have been working on a portable Cedar.  The appearance is Cedar look-and-feel, via direct screen control (on a Sun) or the X window system.  The intent is to grow towards multilingual support in the same look-and-feel, with C, Cedar, CommonLisp, and Scheme early targets.  There will be paper on the Cedar work at the June '89 SIGPLAN conference in Portland on Programming Language Design and Implementation entitled "Experiences Creating a Portable Cedar", by Atkinson, Demers, Hauser,
 Jacobi, Kessler, and Weiser.  Summary: it was hard, but we did it, and Cedar now runs on SPARC and 68020 (at least) based platforms.  BTW, C makes a fine portable intermediate language if you keep it away from people.

A second paper will be appearing at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in December, describing the somewhat unusual portable operating system (sort of) that we built for the Cedar porting.  It is general purpose, not Cedar specific, unlike the work in the paper above.  This second paper is entitled "The Portable Common Runtime Approach to Interoperability", by Weiser, Demers, and hauser.

Of course, a Cedar which runs on many platforms is not yet a promise to make it universally available.  Its possible we will, especially if there is lots of interest, but no definite plans yet.

I can have draft copies of either or both of the two papers sent to anyone who sends me a snail mail address.

-mark