Re: gc-by-area and host uptimes

[Kenneth Forbus <forbus@P.CS.UIUC.EDU>]

	I don't necessarily beleive that Symbolics (or any company for
	that matter) always has the insight to work on only the things with
	the widest impact.	Sometimes companies misjudge the relative
	impact of different alternatives and sometimes they just plain ignore
	the impact issues and work on things
	based upon their whims. Now some things that Symbolics is working on
	clearly do have far greater impact than mark-sweep-gc. Like lower-cost
	higher-performance hardware like Ivory. On the other hand, there have
	been some significant development efforts by Symbolics, ones which
	I assume take more effort than mark-sweep-gc, which I think have far
	less impact than it. For example: the Fortran and Pascal compilers,
	Joshua, Concordia, the document examiner, Statice, most of the
	features of dynamic windows besides infinite scrolling, ...

I agree with Jeff 100%.  If the XL-400 had come out at the same time
as the Explorer-II, Symbolics would be in alot better shape now.  And
given the increases in speeds of generic unix boxes, who will need an
Ivory coprocessor?

I'm not Symbolics, but if I were, I would be pouring heavy effort into
convincing Sun or IBM to pay for porting the Symbolics environment to
their workstations.