Common Lisp for SUNS

[Robert W. Kerns <RWK@f.ila.dialnet.symbolics.com>]

    Date: Tue, 29 Nov 88 11:14:29 EST
    From: bill@red.ipsa.dnd.ca (Bill Pase)
    I'm especially interested in the run time performance, since we hope
    to use one of these lisps as a delivery vehicle for code developed on
    Symbolics Computers.  (It'd be real nice if the lisp benchmark data
    was available?)  Of course if anyone has experiences with using these
    systems as a development environment, I'd not mind hearing it.

    /bill

I have only subjective things to give you, but you will be astonished at the
performance difference between KCL and any Symbolics machine.  I've only done
close-in comparisons with a Symbolics system with minimum memory, running on a
large Sun-3.  For realistic size problems (like compilation, for instance),
KCL is pretty slow.  Well, compilation isn't really a fair choice since it has
to get compiled twice; once in Lisp and once in C.

It is also pretty weak in the development arena.  I would choose either of the
other two alternatives you list.  The major feature of KCL is that it is
nearly free, but remember, Time is Money, too.

There is also a third choice:  Ibuki Common Lisp, which is an improved version
of KCL.  It is supposedly much more usable for development, with a lot of work
done on the debugger, etc.  I don't know anything about its performance.  I
don't know its price, but I suspect it's less than the other two.

There's also a fourth choice, another version of KCL, which I don't know much
about.