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CMUCL was his baby and he was responsible for that. But it addressed UNIX systems. Those usually had not x86 processors at that time and Windows was not very in
by lispm 4y ago
CMUCL was his baby and he was responsible for that. But it addressed UNIX systems. Those usually had not x86 processors at that time and Windows was not very interesting as a platform then.
Windows (and Macs) were never a good place for free Lisps for, since the support of those on proprietary platforms was costly (in terms of knowhow, time and money) and there was no vendor support. Users on those platforms usually expect support for the vendor libraries AND full GUI support. Microsoft and Apple always pushed their own development tools&languages (Visual Basic, C, C++ and Pascal, C/C++, Objective-C, Swift). The Lisp systems used on Windows and Mac were mostly commercial, since they had GUI and platform support. MCL on the Mac and on Windows then Golden Common Lisp, Allegro CL, ...
- rjsw 4y agoCMUCL could have been ported to x86 earlier, I was running UNIX on a 386 in 1987 but only had AKCL for it. I was the first beta-tester for CMUCL on FreeBSD in 1996.
- lispm 4y agoports usually don't happen just so. If there wasn't one, I would interpret it such that there was little demand at that time. SBCL later was forked from CMUCL to have a simpler implementation and build system. Recently the port to M1 Macs went smooth. The person(s) doing the port did an excellent job.
- rjsw 4y agoPorting CMUCL to x86 required someone having access to a machine that it already ran on as well as a 386 running UNIX, plus knowing that the CMUCL sources were available and having internet access to get hold of them. I think these were the limiting factors rather than lack of demand.
- dleslie 4y agoSBCL is still broken on Windows.