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The economics of this is interesting to hear. GNU Common Lisp (https://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/) seems to have existed in va
by fooker 3y ago
The economics of this is interesting to hear.
GNU Common Lisp (https://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/) seems to have existed in various forms from the mid 1980s, but it was probably outclassed by the contemporary big tech companies.
- pfdietz 3y agoGnu CL also had problems as a Common Lisp implementation. It works (like ECL, which is related) by compiling to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler and the object code loaded into the image. This approach generates inferior code to that which an implementation like SBCL can achieve. All the Lisp implementations needed more memory than C programs would, which limited their impact before 32 bit machines became standard. And by that time, C was strongly in place.
- p_l 3y agoThere's arguably also the part where it was, AFAIK, mainly driven by needs of Maxima and it's declaration (or so I recall) of focusing on CLtL first didn't help things either. In comparison, ECL which forked from the same family seems to work out much better over time.
- pfdietz 3y agoAnother big user was ACL2, but that's been ported to SBCL (meaning, standardized enough to run on SBCL).
- anthk 3y agoGNU clisp it's still alive, but I had troubles getting compiled under 32 bit with threads support needed for Bordeuax-Threads from quicklisp.