sef@SEF1.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Fahlman) (10/05/89)
In the past week or so I have received a large number of requests for information on CMU Common Lisp. I was puzzled by the sudden burst of requests until I learned today that Sandro Forin had mentioned CMU Common Lisp on this newsgroup and had given my netmail address as the place to write for more information. I've tried to reply to all the requests that I have received so far, but most of these replies have just bounced back at me. Our local mail software does not do a good job of resolving non-internet return addresses, and I don't have time to figure out the proper return address for each message by hand. So I'll just provide the key bits of information here: CMU Common Lisp is a complete, public-domain implementation of Common Lisp with all of the features usually found in a professional-quality Common Lisp implementation. Our code has been used by a number of manufacturers as the starting point for their own proprietary Common Lisp implementations, but the public-domain version only runs on the IBM RT and only under the Mach operating system. Only CMU and a couple of other universities are running that combination, as far as I know. If you're running something else, you cannot just get a copy of CMU Common Lisp and run it -- you're looking at a serious porting effort of 3-6 man-months, and that's for an expert. We are willing to make our sources available to anyone undertaking a serious porting effort, as long as you are able to access our sources via internet FTP. We're happy to see such ports take place, but we can't offer much direct help. We do not have the resources to send out the source files on tape or floppy disk, though I suppose we could arrange to do this for a price -- probably an unreasonable price, since we really don't want to spend our staff time on this. We are working to port CMU Common Lisp to other, more popular machines, including the Decstation 3100 (Dec's RISC machine) and various 680x0 processors. All of the ports we are working on at present assume the Mach operating system. These ports are not complete yet. We'll make an announcement whenever something becomes available that people can use directly. We're still trying to figure out how to support non-CMU users of our system -- we may arrange to have some company provide end-user support services for a fee. We do not plan to port our Lisp to any non-Mach version of Unix until we can see how the Unix standardization wars are going to come out. We do not want to port to vanilla bsd Unix because we need more flexibility in memory allocation than standard bsd provides. Ditto for vanilla system V. Some people have heard rumors that CMU Common Lisp is running on the RT under IBM's AIX operating system. In fact, we did port our Lisp to AIX at the request of some people from IBM, but the whole project got tangled up in IBM legal foolishness and we have dropped the project for now. We may try again if AIX (or some AIX derivative) emerges as a popular standard in the unix world. I hope that information clarifies the situation. I do not normally read this newsgroup, so if any further clarifications are needed, send mail to my internet address: "sef@cs.cmu.edu". If you want a reply, please include a clear and complete return address. -- Scott Fahlman
murthy@skuld.cs.cornell.edu (Chet Murthy) (10/29/89)
Someone recently posted to this newsgroup about a version of CommonLisp called CMU CommonLisp, which was supposed to be PD, so free, in any case. I'm working with LUCID CommonLISP, and I have a program which exceeds the addressing limits of LUCID - .25Gb. Basically, I need the full addressing range which SUNOS gives you (I'm working on a SUN), which is .5Gigabytes, and Lucid only supports half that. So I'm looking around for other LISPs which mught support the larger range. Also, my program is a bit pathological - the first thing it does on startup is read in a data structure which is around 24 Megabytes in size, as A SINGLE S-expression! The data structure is a LISP object that the program works on, and then dumps back out to a file. So if anybody out there knows of a chaeap CommonLISP that I can get ahold of, I'd appreciate it. It doesn't have to be fast, or fancy - but it needs to be CommonLISP compat, and utilize the whole address space. Thanks in advance, --chet- --chet-- murthy@cs.cornell.edu