DON@atc.bendix.com.UUCP (02/11/87)
One of my colleagues is thinking of buying an AI workstation from DEC. I have heard nothing good about them. However, the negative remarks have not come from people who have actually used them. In order to better advise my colleague, I would like to hear from people who have used the workstations. Of particular interest to me are remarks from people who have used the DEC workstation and one of the standard Lisp workstations (XEROX, Symbolics, LMI, TI, Sun, Apollo). What about the Lisp Sensitive Editor. Is that worth anything? How does it compare to ZMACS? Thank you, Don Mitchell
yerazuws@CSV.RPI.EDU.UUCP (02/12/87)
In article <8702120856.AA22369@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, DON@atc.bendix.com writes: > .... Of particular interest to me are > remarks from people who have used the DEC workstation and one of the > standard Lisp workstations (XEROX, Symbolics, LMI, TI, Sun, Apollo). > First the disclaimer - I've worked for DEC over two summers now, and am hoping to work there permanently. However, the opinions below are (I believe) not significantly influenced by that- and I'm also a stockholder in Symbolics, so *there* :-) I've worked with 3600's, SUNs and AI VAXstations. The Symbolics used to be unquestionably superior- now I'm not so sure. Release 7 of Symbolics not only has proprietary code (and new microcode _again_), but now there are two different LISPS (Zeta and Common) and you have to be careful which LISP window you're typing at. The Symbolics also carry hefty price tags. The color display is a separate monitor- which takes up a good chunk of space. The tools are great, however. Window Debugger (c-m-W) is still unmatched elsewhere. I wouldn't bother with the SUN, especially in a diskless configuration. I wasted (yes, wasted) nine months trying to develop an architecture simulator on Sun 2's. Little things like a server being slow can completely hang your LISP and your editor - so you sit. And sit. And forget what you were doing... The problem is that when you page on a diskless SUN, you generate I/O requests at a HUGE rate compared to normal file I/O. Hence, a server which is only mildly busy as seen by fileio users is essentially locked up as far as the LISP user is concerned. I don't know if adding huge amounts of memory would help the SUN or not... but see the comments under "memory" below. Just so you understand HOW bad diskless SUN's are- We switched from the SUN workstations to a heavily loaded 4.2 BSD /780 and found that we were getting about ten times as much work done- even though we were sharing the machine with twenty other people. Now, the AI VAXstation. I like it a lot. I've got the simulator running (in LISP), the compiler for it (a LISP compiler, in LISP, with chunks migrating into OPS5), and most of my thesis written (in TeX). I've got C when I want to do C-like things, and FORTRAN when that's appropriate. I only have the black and white scope- but the color scope is usable without needing a b/w scope also. The LISP on VAXstations can do graphics, too. Very cleanly. I don't bother with the LISP Language Sensitive Editor, having been addicted to EMACS for so long. Sorry, can't help you there. Suggestion- if you buy the VAXstation, get lots of memory. Five megs is not enough if you have a LISP, three EMACSes and a DCL and are using them all- the LISP will thrash when you gc. Get nine megs (the one meg that comes on the CPU card, plus an eight-meg card) and you'll GC in about six seconds- which is much better than the Symbolics' time of ONE HOUR or more. I don't know if going to 16 megs (max addressable in a MicroVAX II) would improve anything- my system rarely pages at all in the above LISP/EMACS/DCL load configuration. I had Ultrix and Xwindows up for a while instead of DCL; I liked UIS better than X, so I accepted the DCL as part of the package. Besides there's a shell around somewhere.... Disclaimer repeated: I have been and hope again to be an employee of DEC. I am a stockholder of record in Symbolics, Inc. My best drinkin' buddy works for SUN Microsystems. -Bill Yerazunis
malcolm@decwrl.DEC.COM@spar.UUCP (02/19/87)
In article <8702121349.AA14488@csv.rpi.edu> yerazuws@CSV.RPI.EDU (Crah) writes: > I wouldn't bother with the SUN, especially in a diskless >configuration. I wasted (yes, wasted) nine months trying to develop >an architecture simulator on Sun 2's. Little things like a server >being slow can completely hang your LISP and your editor - so you sit. >And sit. And forget what you were doing... You're right....don't even think about running Lisp on a Sun-2. On the other hand Sun-3's (which are three times faster in general than Sun-2's) make a fast lisp workstation. BUT, you must have enough memory on the system to make sure that you don't page when you garbage collect. I work with both Franz and Lucid Common Lisp and they both copy the workspace to garbage collect. When you have to go to the disk (or network) every time you want to garbage collect then you lose big. And then you finish GC and start doing real work again and all the pages you want have already been flushed. I suspect that the reason the limited memory isn't as much a factor with Symbolics workstations is because they do incremental garbage collection. When you are working normally everything works fast.....but go away for a while and come back and watch the swap bar turn solid black for a few seconds. Franz Common Lisp can run quite nicely in 9M of memory. Memory is real cheap these days. I have 16M on my desk and I almost never page while switching back and forth between Lisp and other windows I am using. As far as performance goes, I have seen a Sun3/160 running anywhere between .5 and 4 times a Symbolics 3600. Moving to a Sun3/260 gives you another factor of two performance improvement. Sun's can match the speed of a Symbolics workstation....now if they can just make the environment as nice. Cheers. Malcolm