Re: Common Lisp for SUNS

[Arun Welch <welch@cis.ohio-state.edu>]

>
>Kyoto CL is not generally considered a high-performance Lisp.  Its major
>feature is its portability, since it is written mostly in C and its
>compiler uses C as the intermediate language.  It is also well-known for
>being very faithful to CLtL, implementing all and only what the book
>says.


We're in the process of coming up with a decision on what lisp to get
for the University, and have been looking at Ibuki, Franz, and Envos
(and, as soon as Sun sends us the tape, Sun/ Lucid).  Part of this has
been benchmarking them on Sun-3's and Sun-4's, and we've noticed that
in some benchmarks on the -4 Ibuki comes out ahead of the others.  We were kind
of amazed by this, until we realised that Ibuki uses the native C
compiler, which is optimising for the SPARC architecture on the -4,
while none of the others were.  This wasn't an across-the-board
speedup, just for some of the things we tried.  I'd pretty much agree
with your other assessment of Kyoto CL, modulo the fact that Ibuki has
extended it somewhat (folding in the new error system, for example). 

...arun


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Arun Welch
Lisp Systems Programmer, Lab for AI Research, Ohio State University
welch@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu