[Openmcl-devel] 32-bit x86 port status

[R. Matthew Emerson]

I've been working on a port of CCL to the 32-bit x86 architecture for
a while now.  For the most part, this work has involved staring at a
gdb prompt for extended periods; progress has therefore been hard to
see up to this point.

I'm therefore glad to be able to report that the lisp now starts up
and maps in a (cross-dumped) boot image, which subsequently loads in
the rest of the (cross-compiled) fasls that make up the system.  This
results in a working (for some fairly lenient definition of working)
toplevel.

$ ./dx86cl x86-boot32.image
;Loading level-1.dx32fsl
;Loading ./l1-fasls/l1-cl-package.dx32fsl
[...]
;Loading ./bin/ccl-export-syms.dx32fsl
;Loading ./l1-fasls/version.dx32fsl
;Loading /Users/rme/ccl/library/lispequ.dx32fsl
? (lisp-implementation-version)
"Version 1.1-r8833:9322MS (DarwinX8632)"
? (defun fact (n) (if (= n 1) 1 (* n (fact (1- n)))))
FACT
? (fact 5)
120
? (fact 50)
30414093201713378043612608166064768844377641568960512000000000000
?

This is single-threaded, the GC doesn't work, and there are many other
flaws.  It's not suitable for even experimental use yet---it has a
tendency to dump you into gdb at the slightest provocation---but a
great many things *do* work.

Next up is getting the GC operational, and getting the lisp to compile
itself.