Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!lamy
From: lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Subject: Lisp for Sun 4s
Message-ID: <88Jul14.084518edt.202@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <6632@shamash.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 88 10:05:15 EDT

We are considering candidates for buying a Common Lisp for Sun 4s, and
possibly MIPS.  Performance is important, and at this point this would seem to
rule out Kyoto Common Lisp.  In the commercial arena, we are aware of Franz
Allegro CL and Lucid CL.

We are not considering running Lisp on individual worstations, only on compute
servers with 32 Megs of RAM or more (often for large simulations running for
days).  While we certainly have ideas on the following items, more input would
certainly be nice; how do the Lisps compare on

- floating point performance (no kidding).
- ease of calling C code from Lisp, and vice-versa
- ease of doing graphical output in a network transparent way -- how good
  is X11 or NeWS support?
- Development environment: (note that we would be running Lisp on a machine
  other that the individual's worksation, which is likely to be a puny Sun 3
  -- does X/NeWS save the day for development facilities too?)
- documentation
- price/quality ratio -- last we checked Allegro was much cheaper than Lucid,
  for example; besides marketing, obvious reasons why?

Finally, we also have Symbolics 3640s around.  Does anyone have rough
estimates on how the performance of a Sun 4 running either compiler compares
to that of a 3640?

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4