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From: feeley@raptor.IRO.UMontreal.CA (Marc Feeley)
Subject: MacGambit 2.2.1 and Gambit-C 2.2 on Macintosh
Message-ID: <FEELEY.95Jun19182954@raptor.IRO.UMontreal.CA>
Sender: news@IRO.UMontreal.CA
Organization: Universite de Montreal
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 22:29:54 GMT
Lines: 73

A new version of MacGambit is now available thanks to Brad Lucier who
found the bug causing MacGambit 2.2 to crash on some Macs (PowerMacs in
particular).  The new version, 2.2.1, is simply version 2.2 with the
bug repair contributed by Brad.  Tests on a PowerMac 6100/60 seem to
confirm that that was the problem.  Thanks Brad!

You can FTP the system from ftp.iro.umontreal.ca.  Get the file:
/pub/parallele/gambit/gambit-2.2/MacGambit2.2.1.sea.hqx .

Some people have also asked for a distribution of the Gambit-C system
that is readable on the Macintosh.  The corresponding file is:
/pub/parallele/gambit/gambit-2.2/Gambit-C-2.2.sea.hqx .  Here is
the README file from that distribution:


README file for Macintosh Gambit-C v2.2
---------------------------------------

The Gambit-C system is a portable Scheme development system which
includes an interpreter and compiler.  The system can be built on any
machine with a decent C compiler.

Although it was mainly designed to be used on UNIX workstations, the
system can be built on the Macintosh using the Metrowerks CodeWarrior
C compiler.  You will need CodeWarrior 6, updated with the June 8 1995
patches supplied by Metrowerks (which are available on
sumex.stanford.edu and other sites).  The copy of the CodeWarrior C
compiler I have used is "Academic 6, v1.2.2" updated with the June 8
patches.  Don't try compiling the system with THINK-C; most source
files exceed the 32K code limit on segments imposed by THINK-C.

Note that the Gambit-C system compiled with CodeWarrior will use the
SIOUX library (simple input/output user exchange) as the
user-interface.  A single scrollable window is opened to interact with
the read-eval-print loop.  The user can save the window to a file, and
copy/cut/paste text, but nothing more.  Thus, Gambit-C on the
Macintosh is much less user-friendly than the MacGambit system which
has a builtin Scheme oriented editor, online help, toolbox interface,
user-interrupt feature, etc.  Also, Gambit-C requires a Mac with at
least 10 Mbytes of RAM (this can be lowered by changing the definition
of DEFAULT_HEAP_LENGTH_IN_K in the file "run_ch:setup.c").

The Gambit Scheme interpreter (gsi) and compiler (gsc) can either be
compiled to 68K code or to POWERPC code.  Unfortunately, at the
present time, the Gambit compiler can not be built because CodeWarrior
bombs when compiling it (presumably because the application is too
big... I have sent a bug report to Metrowerks).

The distribution contains the following files and folders:

68K-gsi.pi  Project file for the interpreter for 68K based Macs
PPC-gsi.pi  Project file for the interpreter for POWERPC based Macs
68K-gsc.pi  Project file for the compiler for 68K based Macs
PPC-gsc.pi  Project file for the compiler for POWERPC based Macs
run_ch      Folder containing the C source files for the runtime system
gsi_ch      Folder containing the C source files for the interpreter
gsc_ch      Folder containing the C source files for the compiler
68K-gsi     Precompiled interpreter for 68K based Macs
PPC-gsi     Precompiled interpreter for POWERPC based Macs

On a PowerMac 6100/60 I have compared the performance of the MacGambit
interpreter and Gambit-C interpreter on a simple benchmark to see if it
is preferable to use MacGambit (native 68K emulated by the POWERPC) or
Gambit-C (C compiled to native POWERPC code) on a PowerMac.  The
benchmark computes (fib 22).  All times are in seconds.

MacGambit 2.2    6.6
PPC-gsi          2.6
68K-gsi         35.4

So on a PowerMac, Gambit-C compiled to POWERPC code is about 2.5 times
faster than MacGambit compiled to 68K code, and about 14 times faster
than Gambit-C compiled to 68K code.
