Re: A Dylan implemented on Common Lisp

[Christopher.Young@ISL1.RI.CMU.EDU]

>Fortunately, there are alternatives for those who like the
>productivity and the parentheses but can't stand the size.  Our
>commercial product Ilog Talk has a minimum application overhead (on
>most 32 bit machines) of 600k of code in a shared library and 400k of
>dynamic data; we're looking to make it even smaller.  This basic
>library includes a full-featured Lisp runtime with a MOP-based object
>system.  Other libraries are also available.

When we were using an ilog product on a Unix machine, the performance was
so miserable we decided to drop it. It was big, slow, and the supposed
portable graphics were neither very portable nor very graphical. We were
very nonplused.

Quite frankly, I believe it is quite possible to create a sophisticated
run time app in MCL. All this dissing of MCL is becoming a sort of turn
off for me. If there is any language which is perfect, I have yet to hear
of it. Dylan may be better, sure, but I don't know enough about it and
how many platforms it runs on to want to use it right now, despite Scott's
credentials.

A lot of problems people have are more due to their not programming efficiently
or using expensive, cumbersome add-ons than to CL or MCL itself.

Finally, I would like to see a response from Digitool about the claims
the one guy is making against them versus Franz. I will post a summary soon
(in the next few days) of responses I received re: porting to Windows, but
most were negative towards Franz. I'm pretty happy with MCL myself, what with
the libraries available and all, though I do look forward to 3.0. I also
think Franz is pretty overpriced just from what I've read, but I'm still
exploring this area.

				-- Chris