Re: CMU Common Lisp

[Rob_MacLachlan@LISP-PMAX1.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

Almost all of the system can be cross-compiled, however to do a full system
build you need load in all the subsystems and then make a suspended image.
This requires a "big" machine and a fair amount of time, so it is much
nicer if you can distribute suspended image files.  This is how we have
been doing our binary releases, but it definitely requires access to one
machine of each hardware/OS combination.

For purposes of a multi-OS binary distribution, it might make sense to
distribute object files and a bootstrap image (what we call a "kernel").
The advantage of this approach is that you can build the C code from
sources and then link it against the Lisp system, instead of having to
distribute a complete system image for each OS/hardware combination.
And it would also make it possible to bootstrap a new OS without a working
Lisp.

    I have two more questions for you (sorry to be a pest).

You're not being a pest, and I'm sure there are lots of things that we will
have to figure out about doing this distribution.  In particular, almost
all of our work is done in the local hacked-up CMU/Mach OS environment, so
we don't have much experience with other flavors of Unix.

    A) Are there any contact address for people who are working on ports of CL
    to other machines,

The only port definitely in progress (and is stalled last I knew) is a port
to the HPPA (Snake) processor.  The person is Tim Moore
(moore@defmacro.cs.utah.edu).  The port was stalled because they were trying to
get it to run under Mach on the HP, and the OS was too flakey.

It would be pretty easy to get the MIPS/DECstation version running under
Ultrix, but nobody is currently working on it.  Hopefully someone out in
netland will volunteer to do it.

    B) is there a mailing list for announcements about the
    state of CMUlisp?  If so, I'd like to be on it.

The only mailing list we have so far is cmucl-bugs@cs.cmu.edu.  We do
announcements there, but it also gets all of our bug report traffic
(currently not overwhelming.)  You can get on this list by sending to
cmucl-bugs-request.

How do you do releases?  Is the "Gnu tape" a constantly moving target, or
does it go through noticeable release cycles?

  Rob