Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utah-cs.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!utah-cs!shebs From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) Newsgroups: net.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Query -- Portable Standard Lisp from Univ of Utah Message-ID: <3133@utah-cs.UUCP> Date: Mon, 3-Dec-84 15:08:22 EST Article-I.D.: utah-cs.3133 Posted: Mon Dec 3 15:08:22 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 5-Dec-84 00:48:24 EST References: <1571@psuvax1.UUCP> Organization: Univ of Utah CS Dept Lines: 40 As the flamingest person in the PSL group at Utah (:-)), I have been selected to officially respond to the PSL query. Lest I be accused of partiality, let me just say that I used to do a lot of Franz hacking, and have diddled with Zetalisp some also. PSL is *not* buggy. More accurately, it is no more buggy than Franz or Zetalisp (read the franz-friends mailing list sometime!). In over a year of substantial PSL hacking, I have only encountered about two bona-fide bugs. I *have* had problems with various options; PSL provides many more ways to screw yourself than does Franz! But normal users don't do those sorts of things anyway (like messing with *compress, stepping on property lists, and other things that the manual usually warns about...) PSL is *fast*. There were many unhappy people at AAAI-84, when the Gabriel benchmarks showed 68K PSL frequently beating out Symbolics and LMI. VAX PSL was about 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than Franz (depending on the specific benchmark). PSL's weakest showing was in floating-point arithmetic, which was still not too bad. PSL is *portable*. We recently did a demo showing PSL running the same large program on 6 machines - Apollo DN300, Sun, HP 9836, VAX, DEC-20, and Cray. IBM, Univac, and other ports are in the works... PSL is *written in PSL* (about 98-99% to be exact, the remainder being a little LAP code and some machine-dependent routines in C or Pascal or whatever). By contrast, the entire Franz kernel is in C, and legible only to experienced VAX/C hackers (maybe). As a result, improvements in the compiler yields overall gains. The present compiler compares well with C compilers, but we're working on a better one... The PSL distribution *has more tools* (including screen editors and Common Lisp compatibility packages) than Franz does. In summary, PSL is a real live production quality Lisp, and is overall better than Franz for Vaxen (there, now we'll never get anything from UCB again! :-) ) stan shebs (shebs@utah-orion)