chrisr@mntgfx.mentor.com (Chris Rosebrugh) (05/23/89)
is there a viable LISP development system on the Mac that one can use
to create an application which isn't gigantic and slow? this isn't cynical,
i used Symbolics 3620s, 3640s, and 3650s for 3 years for development of a
product which was delivered under Franz Lisp on Apollos and vaxes, so i
love the language and the development environment (at least the Symbolics
one, Franz is pretty minimul) but not the size and speed.
i have no problem writing Lisp code to be somewhat optimized, etc. so that
it will be of decent speed and limited size, but is the Mac implementation
of Coral/Allegro CL viable for doing such work? are there other
implementations of Lisp out there that are any good? what do these cost?
do they do a decent job of hiding some of the pain of Mac development?
do they provide the wrappers for creating Mac applications? is C really
the way to go for this exercise? i just bought LightSpeed 3.01 for sport,
but, boy would i like to return to LISP!
thanks for any info.
--
Chris Rosebrugh | ...!{decwrl,sequent,tessi}!mntgfx!chrisr
Mentor Graphics Corporation | chrisr@pdx.MENTOR.COM
Beaverton, Oregon | (I'm all by myself in this one.)bds@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry D Smith) (05/25/89)
We've written a large, complex scheduling system on Symbolics machines which we've ported to the Mac II running Allegro CL with a 19 in Sony Trinitron monitor. The overall performance was slightly slower than the same program running on a Sun 3/60 with Lucid 3.0, and quite a bit slower than the progrm running on a Symbolics 3650. Allegro's memory management is pretty poor, and garbage collection was continously triggered by the color graphics. The reason for this was that all graphics objects such as pixmaps reside on the Mac heap. Allegro cannot do a gc on them. Since Allegro insists on keeping in its heap as much of the system memory as possible, everytime a large graphics object is created, Allegro must downsize its heap to make room, and this triggers a global gc. Similarly, whenever a large graphics object is released, Allegro immediately increases its heap, which also triggers a global gc. In all, I think the poor memory management more than anything caused us to give up the Mac effort. We're now working on both Symbolics machines and Sun 4's.
sims@stsci.EDU (Jim Sims) (05/26/89)
In article <1989May22.195611.756@mntgfx.mentor.com>, chrisr@mntgfx.mentor.com (Chris Rosebrugh) writes: > is there a viable LISP development system on the Mac that one can use > to create an application which isn't gigantic and slow? this isn't cynical, We have just re-implemented the HST scheduling system front-end expert system TRANSFORMATION in LISP using ACL on the MAC. It is about 3 megabytes of code, plus the PCL code from XEROX PARC (THANKS guys!!!!). It runs FASTER on my mac IIx than on the 8650 (light load). Zat good enuff? The environment is pretty decent (but not a LISPM).. Watch out for arithmetic on the IIx, though. (LOG 0.0), (MOD n 0) and other such crash LISP COMPLETELY. like, gone.... the (mod n 0) corrupts system SO BAD that you have to re-boot to recover, usually. Even with all this, I like it.... -- Jim Sims Space Telescope Science Institute Baltimore, MD UUCP: {arizona,decvax,hao,ihnp4}!noao!stsci!sims ARPA: sims@stsci.edu SPAM: SCIVAX::SIMS