mcl features

[hall@research.att.com (Bob Hall)]

    From: vere@netcom.com (Steven Vere)
    Date: Fri, 12 Nov 93 17:52:44 PST

       I am prospecting for a lisp implementation on an affordable
    computer.  Could you answer a couple of questions about mcl?  

    1) What is the maximum virtual memory size...

I don't know.  Not more than the size disk you buy :-)

    2) Does mcl support multitasking?

It does support asynchronous interrupt handling, but is not multi-
threaded as yet (though I believe this is planned for a future release(?)).

    3) Can you provide any  rough comparisons of  the speed of mcl running
    on a   top-of-the-line apple computer  vs.  some other common  (but of
    course more  expensive)  hardware/software  combinations,   such as  a
    Sparc2 running  Franz,   or one of  the    Symbolics computers running
    Genera?

I'm not sure whether a IIfx is classed as "top-of-the-line" any more, but
I frequently run the same code on a Mac IIfx under MCL 2.0.1 and on
Franz Allegro v4.1 on a Sparc2.  The Mac code is typically 1.5 to 2.5 times
slower, depending on various factors like how much i/o it does and 
how much memory the application uses.  (My Sparc 2 has 64Meg of physical RAM
with virtual memory and lots of swap space on the local disk.  Thus, gc on
the Sparc is usually less than 5% of the run time.  My IIfx has
36Meg of physical RAM and I don't use vm on the mac, so gc costs for the
same code figure to be higher.  On the other hand, the MCL code seems
to use significantly less space for a given program because of the
quality of the compiler.)

-- Bob