[Openmcl-devel] Maxima + Clozure on Windows

[Barton Willis]

> Sounds very exciting indeed but I am curious why this will be great 
> for the Maxima community? I mean I can see that this will be great 
> for the CL and CCL community - I could use it for instance - but the
> value added to the existing Maxima community  is less obvious to me.
> It is not that I have doubts but I would just like to know the 
> actual reasons why the Maxima community is interested in Lisp 
interfaces. 
 
Last I looked, most Maxima downloads are for Windows, but only CLISP
and GCL will build Maxima on Windows. (I can build and run a command
line Maxima with Clozure, but I haven't done a full Maxima build.)

Maxima built with GCL runs fast (they grew up together), but many
common tools (CFFI, for example) don't run under GCL. And that's been
a problem for us, I think. Maybe we'd experiment with GSL instead of
automatically translating fortan to Lisp if we could use CFFI with all
platforms. I don't have any experience with CLISP.

All this is just my opinion; there hasn't been all that much interest
in yet another Lisp for Maxima expressed on the Maxima mailing list. A
few other people have experimented with Maxima+Clozure, and some fixes
for building Maxima with Clozure were checked in the other day.

Barton