Re: A Dylan implemented on Common Lisp

[jh@cambridge.apple.com (John Hotchkiss)]

At 6:31 PM 3/16/95, Erik Naggum wrote:
>[James McCartney]
>
>|   The 'hello' application is 56K on disk, it has to load the Dylan
>|   framework which is 524K, the main Dylan library 465K, the mac toolbox
>|   library which is 57K. Time from double clicking the hello application
>|   on the hard disk (I copied it all to the HD from the CD before running
>|   it) until 'Hello, Dylan!' appears is 22 seconds on a PowerMac
>|   8100/80. When looking at 'About this Macintosh' in the Finder it
>|   reveals that 'hello' is running in a 2000K partition which is about 75%
>|   full.

These numbers are from alpha release software (sent out under
non-disclosure by the way). The author fails to mention that in this case
neither the development environment nor the application are running native
on the PowerPC. As with MCL the "About This Macintosh" partition and
percentage is not indicative of how much memory is really being consumed
because automatic memory management handles the allocation of memory. I
have no idea whether we tried to find out what the minimal partition size
could be for that application, or whether we simply took the default size
when creating the application.

In short, please wait for a released product before analyzing too deeply
the performance and size characteristics of Apple Dylan. We're proud of
what we've done so far, but it is still a work in progress.

All this being said, I think Common Lisp is a great language, and MCL a
particularly good and practical implementation. I sure wish I could read
about MCL on this list.

John Hotchkiss
Apple Computer