Re: Hello / CLISP flying into outer space ? :-)

[kr@shell.portal.com (kr)]

At 0:16 7/18/95, Erann Gat wrote:
>  I'd like to tell you a bit about what I'm using it for, and
>find out who is currently doing active development on it.

Thank you for your interesting message. Unfortunately, I have not yet
gotten something similarly interesting to share. In the small amount of
spare time I  have, I have been working on a program to help design
polymers that fold up predictably, similar to proteins. But there is still
quite a way to go. I will try to make sure that it will run on both CLISP
and GCL.

>I am using CLisp to prototype a spacecraft executive based on a control
>methodology called conditional sequencing.  I won't bore you with the
>details; if anyone is interested, contact me.

I personally would be very interested in knowing more about it. If you
could send a summary description to me, I would appreciate it.

Will this code be freely available in its source ?

>The current project is only a prototype, but I am also interested in using
>Lisp for actual flight code.

Great.
Why are you using CLISP and not GCL ? Would one not assume that GCL could
be faster because it can be fully compiled, not just byte-compiled as in
CLISP ? There seems to also exist a GCL derivative called ECL (Embedded
Common LISP) that claims to have multiple thread capability. Have you
investigated that as well ?

>My approach is, rather than arguing with people, to instead build working
>systems that meet all the performance requirements.  Towards this end, I and
>a student of mine (with considerable help from Bruno) have ported CLisp (the
>January 1995 version) to vxWorks, which is a real-time operating system that
>is one of the lead candidates for use on flight hardware.

Which CPU chips actually are flying ? What clock rate ? How much memory
does the flight computer carry ?

So will CLISP be used in a real-time, multi-tasked fashion ? That certainly
would be an interesting upgrade. :-)


Greetings
Markus Krummenacker