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From: goldin@spot.uchicago.edu (Alexey Goldin)
Subject: Re: Common LISP: The Next Generation
In-Reply-To: Tim Bradshaw's message of 06 Sep 1996 12:32:07 +0100
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Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 13:40:41 GMT
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:22559 comp.lang.scheme:16738

In article <ey3iv9rria0.fsf@staffa.aiai.ed.ac.uk> Tim Bradshaw <tfb@aiai.ed.ac.uk> writes:


   I figure that it's much harder to take a very comprehensive system and
   prune it than to take a very spartan system (like C) and extend it
   gradually until you get the enormous C-based programming systems we
   see today.  So it may be better to find a mechanism which means that
   you don't have to do that after all -- lisp-as-a-shared-library,


Here is the plan how to take over the world.

I do not see what stops someone from taking let's say Bigloo
Scheme and compiling libbigloo as shared library. You would need
to change couple of lines in Makefile (adding -fPIC to gcc
options and replacing "ar rc" to "gcc --shared") and you
immediately have 10K Scheme compiled executables. The next step
would be to write couple of hundred of enormously useful
utilities using this library (just about 1Meg) and put RPM
package in ftp.redhat.com:/pub/contrib. This way you sneak this
shared library and idea of small fast lisp programs on millions
home computers used by hackers that do not know what to do with
their computers and spare time --- an enviroment very friendly
for bizarre languages (think about it --- they even use Perl and
TCL!).

Use Gambit if you do not like bigloo. SCM is OK too, but it
needs SLIB and has pretty big startup time.

Next step would be enormously useful program using CMU CL ;-)

I suspect that the part with writing useful utilities would be
the most difficult.


