Don't panic

[Espen J. Vestre <espen@coli.uni-sb.de>]

Although I'm deeply concerned by the news about the discountinuation of
MCL, I think there's no reason to panic immediately.

After all, MCL is running very fast and smoothly on current machines,
some applications are running just as fast (or only 30-50% slower) on my
Quadra 700 as under Allegro on our server machine (a 5-processor
SparcServer 1000) (the only applications I can think of which are
comparatively slow on MCL are those which require non-short floats).

It might even run very acceptable in emulation mode on the PowerMacs (I'm
sure it will run smoother than the native MS Word 8-)).  It wouldn't
surprise me if many applications will run just as fast on a PowerMac in
emulation mode as you can run them on a Common Lisp on a Windows/Pentium
system.

So let's keep MCL alive for at least a few months.  In the meantime,
someone - Apple itself or some other company - just _has_ to find out
that a PPC implementation of MCL might be a real winner.

(and to those who have access to a PowerMac: PLEASE tell us,
 at least by next monday :-), exactly how the emulation
 speed is, for instance by posting a few functions with
 timings!!)
________________________________________________________________________
 Espen J. Vestre,                                  espen@coli.uni-sb.de
 Universitdt des Saarlandes,
 Computerlinguistik, Gebdude 17.2
 Postfach 1150,                                 tel. +49 (681) 302 4501
 D-66041 SAARBR\CKEN, Germany                   fax. +49 (681) 302 4351