[Openmcl-devel] OpenMCL future

[Christophe Rhodes]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 09:21:44PM +0200, Rainer Joswig wrote:
> At 6:34 Uhr -0600 06.09.2002, Gary Byers wrote:
> 
> >These are things that I have in mind; I'd certainly be interested
> >in hearing other people's ideas.
> 
> It seems that there are a lot of Lisp implementations on OS X.
> ACL is there and LispWorks seems to be in the works. Plus
> some more.

I suspect that CMUCL and/or SBCL will eventually be making an appearance
on OS X; several of the CMUCL developers, at least, have acquired Macs
with OS X, and I know of someone who is interested in having SBCL there
:)

> - CLIM (the real CLIM, not FreeCLIM) based on Cocoa/Quartz

As far as I am aware, "FreeCLIM" aka "McCLIM" is an implementation of
the CLIM specification... what do you mean by "real" here?

> - investigation where Altivec could be used to speed up the
>   Lisp kernel or compiled Lisp code

I've been interested in this (well, coming from sbcl/x86-land, the
analogous question of how SSE can help SBCL :-), and the conclusion that
I came to was that first the compiler needs to understand loops
properly. I don't know offhand what understanding the OpenMCL compiler
has; the CMUCL/SBCL "Python" compiler doesn't do very much at all with
loops, sadly, so it might be quite some work.

One thing I would be interested in is a slightly nebulous cooperation
between at the very least the "free" implementors; for instance, in the
sphere of extensions, it may be that interfaces can sensibly be shared
across implementations. As a concrete example of this, consider Unicode
support; work is ongoing to add Unicode to CMUCL; SBCL will probably
acquire support eventually; Rainer wants support in OpenMCL; CLISP has
it already, as do ACL and SCL; we might be able to save ourselves (and
our users, if that's a distinct set) some pain if we hash out the issues
involved, even if we end up not being 100% compatible in the end...

Cheers,

Christophe
-- 
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