Re: Symbolics & Sun-3 + Lucid Dev Envs

[David Murray Bridgeland <db@wright.sw.mcc.com>]

     From: Robert W. Kerns <RWK@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

     I find I don't actually read in sources all that often, perhaps
     because I only boot about once a month.  (That's about how often
     we generate new worlds around here)  I can do that because
     of the large address space and the EGC.  I sometimes will do a
     (gc-immediately) before going home, but otherwise don't use the
     dynamic GC.
     
     I'm curious how often customers (that is, all you guys)
     end up booting their (your) machines, and what you boot them for.
     
     I guess I'm also curious about how often people end up booting
     Sun's.  That is, booting Lisp on a Sun, I don't care about Unix,
     (or the FEP, which I consider to be about equivalent ;-).

I use both a 3640 and EXCL on a Sun.  I find that I boot the lispm
about every two or three weeks (and usually because of inexplicable
turds in the world due, no doubt, to bad side effects of things
I've done over that two or three weeks).  I boot lisp on the Sun
several times a day, usually because it is hopelessly wedged.

To be fair, I'm a new user of lisp on the suns (3 months), while
I have 3 years lispm experience.  I'm also using several experimental
and beta test packages in the excl lisp (lightweight processes, pcl
from PARC, etc.), and the problems seem not 
due to common lisp, but rather the excl environments's problems 
with recovering from strange states in the experimental code.

Bob Boyer is 100% right about gnuemacs, btw:  it is a wonder to
behold.

Dave Bridgeland -- MCC Software Technology
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