lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) (07/14/88)
We are considering candidates for buying a Common Lisp for Sun 4s, and possibly MIPS. Performance is important, and at this point this would seem to rule out Kyoto Common Lisp. In the commercial arena, we are aware of Franz Allegro CL and Lucid CL. We are not considering running Lisp on individual worstations, only on compute servers with 32 Megs of RAM or more (often for large simulations running for days). While we certainly have ideas on the following items, more input would certainly be nice; how do the Lisps compare on - floating point performance (no kidding). - ease of calling C code from Lisp, and vice-versa - ease of doing graphical output in a network transparent way -- how good is X11 or NeWS support? - Development environment: (note that we would be running Lisp on a machine other that the individual's worksation, which is likely to be a puny Sun 3 -- does X/NeWS save the day for development facilities too?) - documentation - price/quality ratio -- last we checked Allegro was much cheaper than Lucid, for example; besides marketing, obvious reasons why? Finally, we also have Symbolics 3640s around. Does anyone have rough estimates on how the performance of a Sun 4 running either compiler compares to that of a 3640? Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
dcmartin@vangogh.Berkeley.EDU (David C. Martin) (07/25/88)
In article <88Jul14.084518edt.202@neat.ai.toronto.edu>, lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes:
I have no idea about floating point performance, but I think that Franz beat Lucid in the Sun4 benchmark arena.
Both Allegro and Lucid have nice FFI's for the C language (which is all I
have used).
Allegro has support for CLX (XV11R2) and my XCL (XV10R4) interfaces, but
I think Lucid only has support for XCL - I haven't heard anything about a
CLX port, but then again.. I don't hear everything. Franz also has a
CommonWindows port for NeWS and I think may also have one for CLX.
I often run my LISP on a VAX8600 from my HP bobcat and Franz has a really
nice interface between GNU emacs 18.51 and their LISP. Let's you run multiple top-level in multiple buffers, and find the code for a function
from the LISP, not using TAGS. I don't know what Lucid provides.
As for price/quality, beats me.. I didn't pay for my LISPs. I like Franz
lisp, but then again, I don't use Lucid all that much. One thing I do like
are the people at Franz and the lack of having to deal w/ both Lucid and
Sun when I want to get an update.
Hope this helps.
dcm
-----
David C. Martin arpa: dcmartin@postgres.Berkeley.EDU
University of California, Berkeley uucp: {ihnp4,decvax}!ucbvax!dcmartin
Electronics Research Lab at&t: 415/642-9585 (O)barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin) (07/25/88)
In article <25203@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> dcmartin@vangogh.Berkeley.EDU (David C. Martin) writes: >Allegro has support for CLX (XV11R2) and my XCL (XV10R4) interfaces, but >I think Lucid only has support for XCL - I haven't heard anything about a >CLX port, but then again.. I don't hear everything. The version of CLX that comes with the standard X11R2 distribution contains a bunch of "#+lucid" expressions. This implies that someone at least started a port. I haven't actually tried it, though. Barry Margolin Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar
jim@THRUSH.STANFORD.EDU (Jim Helman) (08/18/88)
> Allegro has support for CLX (XV11R2) and my XCL (XV10R4) interfaces, but > I think Lucid only has support for XCL - I haven't heard anything about a > CLX port, but then again.. I don't hear everything. CLX from the X11R2 distribution works fine with Lucid 2.1 on our Sun-3's. Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics Stanford University