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