Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: hunter@work.nlm.nih.gov (Larry Hunter)
Subject: Re: Which machines are best for common lisp?
In-Reply-To: mshann@hyperthink.lerc.nasa.gov's message of 21 Oct 1994 07:14:42 GMT
Message-ID: <HUNTER.94Oct27114421@work.nlm.nih.gov>
Sender: news@nlm.nih.gov
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Organization: National Library of Medicine
References: <387pp2$7nf@sulawesi.lerc.nasa.gov>
Date: 27 Oct 1994 15:44:21 GMT
Lines: 47


Ray Han asks:

   In this inquirey I wish to exclude so called 'lisp machines'
   and restrict the opinions to machines found in the typical
   laboratory environment (Sparc, SGI,HP,DEC,Intel, ..etc.)
   Let's also exclude MPP platorms such as the CM-5 running
   *Lisp and just stick to high-performace desktop scientific
   workstation systems.

   Question: Which ones run common Lisp the best? Which common Lisp
   is the best for a given architechture?

Good idea for a thread!  I haven't done any extensive testing, nor have I
ever seen any published, so this is just anecdotal.  However, I have to say
that I am *VERY* happy with my current LISP environment, and I'm doing some
pretty compute-intensive research work in it.

I'm running Franz Allegro CL 4.2 on an SGI Indigo^2, with the 150MHz R4400
CPU with 96M ram.  I think the most important thing when developing
prototype lisp systems is to have enough memory so that no swapping goes on.
I recently upgraded from 64M and the difference was just amazing.  GC's are
now basically instantaneous.  My development environment is FSF emacs, with
Allegro's hooks -- instant access to CLtL2 and Franz's docs, with apropos,
incremental compilation, Meta-. works well on CLOS objects and methods, and
ACL's trace now (finally!) has a decent interface to the CLOS stuff, too.

I prefer SGIs to Suns for lots of fairly idiosyncratic reasons above and
beyond the better bang for the buck (e.g. lots of MolBio software I use runs
only on them), and I haven't really given Harlequin a fair evaluation, but I
love working in this environment.

I'm very curious to hear about other people's preferences and experiences,
and a serious competitive analysis would be really invaluable.

Larry


--
Lawrence Hunter, PhD.
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