Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU ("Scott E. Fahlman") (01/25/86)
In response to Nick Gall's query about Common Lisp for the RT PC: We at CMU have been working behind the scenes for some time to port our Spice/Accent operating system from the now-defunct Perq machine to the new IBM workstation, now dubbed the RT PC. As a part of that effort, we have ported the Spice Lisp implementation of Common Lisp, including the Hemlock editor. This port is mainly the work of Dave McDonald, with assists from Rob Maclachlan and Skef Wholey. Lisp and Hemlock are now running pretty well, with only a few finishing touches to be added and a lot of tuning to be done. There are still some holes in the Accent operating system for this machine, but we are working feverishly to patch them up. We are in the process of taking some benchmarks on the Lisp now. Early indications show the speed of the pre-tuning RT PC Lisp to be roughly in the ballpark (give or take a factor of two) of the Symbolics 3600 and the Sun 3, though you have to be careful with declarations and give up most of the runtime checking to go that fast. (Also necessary on other stock hardware like Sun, but not on Symbolics.) Please do not flood us with request for this system. The Lisp is not particularly to port over to any flavor of Unix, and Accent is not yet ready for use outside the friendly confines of CMU. At some point in the future, we may make the whole package available WITHOUT ANY SUPPORT, for users elsewhere who can tolerate unsupported university-quality software, but before we do that we will have to think very hard about how to minimize the hassles to all concerned. If we do that, I'll see that people reading this list hear about it. IBM has not announced any plans for introducing a supported Common Lisp product on the RT PC's officially sanctioned unix-based operating system. I believe that there would be great demand for such a product, but what their plans are I can't say. -- Scott