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From: birkholz@dagobah.indirect.com (Matthew Birkholz)
Subject: Solaris Users
Message-ID: <BIRKHOLZ.94Nov6002257@dagobah.indirect.com>
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In-Reply-To: eloyot@palantir.willamette.edu's message of 4 Nov 1994 17:40:42 GMT
Date: Sun, 6 Nov 1994 07:22:57 GMT
References: <39drmq$a1b@earth.willamette.edu>
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   From: eloyot@palantir.willamette.edu (Edmond Loyot)
   Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
   Date: 4 Nov 1994 17:40:42 GMT

   [...]
   Does anyone use Scheme on a SPARC running Solaris. I looked in the FAQ
   and there was precious little mention of free implmentations that run 
   on Solaris. I'd like to run MIT-Scheme but there is no pre-built
   version for Solaris. Can this be built from sources?

What is your Solaris running on?  The operating system specific microcode
_may_ need to be ported.  I don't recall how POSIX it is, but I know an
effort was made.  If your Solaris libraries are POSIX, you might just try
building the microcode without change.  In any case, the microcode is
written in C and it should be fairly easy to get working on a UNIX-like
operating system.  You can build this bit from sources.

What you _can't_ build from sources is the MIT Scheme runtime system (ye
ol' bootstrapping problem).  You also don't want to build LIAR from
sources.  (LIAR would have to be interpreted as it compiles itself, which
takes approximately forever.)  Luckily, all operating system dependencies
are in the microcode.  Scheme worlds (bands) are portable across
architectures (though it is possible for UNIX bands to lack DOS-specific
code or vice versa these days).  Thus my original question: what's your
architecture?

BTW, I assume you are well aware of MIT Scheme's limitations.  It is not
(yet) prepared to shoehorn itself into a small executable.

   Any other suggestions or recommendations?

MIT Scheme is cool.  I've been having fun with the multi-threading, though
messing with it can easily lock up the entire world.  If you go this route,
you'll want to have LOTS (32Mb?) of memory...

Matthew Birkholz
birkholz@midnight.com
