gjc@BUCSF.BU.EDU (George J. Carrette) (02/05/88)
CScheme is written in C and has a large library of code written in Scheme loaded into it. Having seen the development in progress I can say that there was not much attention paid to size or time efficiency. Macscheme was obviously written with efficiency in mind. It should not be suprising that one implementation is much larger or slower than another. (Perhaps I'm wrong, maybe it should be suprising, since one would not expect to see such large differences between, say, two FORTRAN implementations. What is it about lisp that allows for such wide range of qualities of implementation?) Even a common-lisp implementation could be relatively small. KCL, Kyoto Common Lisp, a c-coded implementation, even contains a compiler and debugger, and checks in at about 1.7 megabytes on an Encore MultiMax. (This is not a recommendation). T from Yale checks in at 2.3 Meg on a SUN-III. Gnu Emacs by comparison is 1.3 Meg on the same machine. * As is well known to readers of the old LISP-FORUM mailing list, and also to readers of PLAYBOY FORUM, *size* is not your best measure of quality. -gjc