Re: A Native Lisp for PowerMac

[pjackson@falcon.ic.net (Philip Jackson)]

David B. Lamkins (dlamkins@teleport.com) wrote:
: pjackson@falcon.ic.net (Philip Jackson) wrote:

: >past, readers of this newsgroup may be interested to know that there is
: >now at least one version of CommonLisp that runs native  on the PowerMac
: >and compiles to generate native code on the PowerMac, namely
: >PowerLisp 1.2.

: Yes.  I've been checking out each new release of PowerLisp since it was first available.  While it's true that 1.2 runs native and c=
: ompiles to native code on a PPC Macintosh, and is to my knowledge the first Mac Lisp system to do so, it is not a full Common Lisp. =
:  It is missing CLOS, pathname support, and conditions -- probably more.  Also, it does not have reasonable debugging support yet.

: I think that Roger Corman has made great strides in completing what he has done so far; I don't wish to belittle his efforts.  I jus=
: t want to make sure that folks know what they're getting into with PowerLisp.  If you're looking for an inexpensive Mac almost-Commo=
: n Lisp, PowerLisp is probably worth the $50 shareware fee for the relative improvement over XLISP (which is free).  But if you need =
: a good Lisp development system, stick with MCL and tough it out until the PPC native version appears.

: Dave

Thanks for your comments. I agree with most of your points though not quite
with your conclusion, and least yet.

While it is true that PowerLisp is not a full CommonLisp, it appears to me
that it may have enough CommonLisp functionality to be useful, at least for
some purposes. For example, I am encouraged that PowerLisp claims to support
CommonLisp hashtables, which I use a lot in my code. There is some limited
support for pathnames as strings, including pathnames relative to a 
default directory, though system-independent pathnames are not supported.
There also are some debugging functions, though I would agree that PowerLisp
does not yet have a full set of debugging tools. It is definitely true that
PowerLisp does not support CLOS, but it appears to have a lot of 
functionality from CLtL1...

This may meet the requirements of my code fairly well, which tends to be
relatively straightforward systems programming type code... Also, my code
is compute-bound, not interactive, and I'm trying to get every ounce of
performance from it, running compiled in native mode on a PowerMac.
(Actually, right now I'm running on a 40 mhz 68040, but planning to
migrate to a 100 mhz 601 in the next 2 months or so.)  

Of course, I could go the route of just writing my code in C, not Lisp.
However, I like the flexibility and productivity gains that I get by
writing in Lisp, so I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too. ;-)

So given this set of requirements, PowerLisp looks pretty good to me,
much better than XLISP, which I understand runs interpreted.  If I can
port my code from MCL 2.0.1 (where it's been running quite well for the
past year or two) to PowerLisp 1.2, then I can run native on the PowerMac
until MCL also supports native mode.  

So, that's my plan, until and unless I find another better CommonLisp that
runs native on PowerMac. However, I'm still very new to using PowerLisp
and time will tell whether this plan works or not-- So far, I'm optimistic.

Phil Jackson