Anybody using CLOE (was: LISP on PCs)

[kma@SAMSON.cadr.amis.com (K. Mark Alexander)]

    Date: Wed, 9 Jan 91 12:23+0100
    From: berni@iml.fhg.de (Stefan Bernemann)

	Date: Tue, 8 Jan 91 19:52 EST
	From: Qobi@ZERMATT.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jeffrey Mark Siskind)

	[...]
	Is
	anybody using CLOE? Are they happy with it?
		Jeff

    I'm also deeply interested in experiences (cheers? desperation?)
    from anybody using CLOE (on PCs. Anybody using it on UNIX boxes?).

We ported an application to CLOE running on an IBM 386 laptop with 8M
memory and 60M disk.  The application is a collection of engineering
expert system tools for desigining integrated circuits.  Its size is
somewhere in the 40-50k lines of code range.  And, it conses like crazy
so it isn't tuned well for non-symbolics platforms.  Performance on the
386 is slow but not unbearable.  I've heard some say the performance is
roughly equivalent to a 3640.  I believe that this is true if you have
plenty of memory (16M+) and you spend a fair amount of time tweaking
your application.  Just off the top of my head I would say our
application runs about 1/2 to 2/3 the speed of our 3640 (2MW memory).

In my opinion there are 2 major pluses to CLOE.

1) Porting common-lisp code from lispm to pc is a breeze!  Even without
using the cloe-developer tools.  This includes things done in clos and
clim.  I'm extremely pleased with clim on the pc.  I only found a couple
of minor inconsistencies between the lispm and the pc.

2) The CLOE MS-DOS VM paging scheme makes it possible to do big things
on the PC.  Previously we had been trying to port our application to the
pc using gold-hill without success.  The problem was that by the time
the application was loaded there just wasn't enough memory left to do
anything with it.

On the downside:  Pathnames don't behave correctly.  I've had a couple
of crashes that symbolics hasn't been able to reproduce but I'm
convinced these were caused by gc bug(s) and I was able to implement a
work-around.  And, Symbolics has been fixing gc bugs so I'm hoping the
crashes won't happen in the next release.

In summary I'd say we've been very pleased with CLOE.

    Another question:
    Is there a *remarkable* disk performance difference comparing the
    ESDI interfaces on XL1200's and SCSI interfaces on UX1200? is it
    worth the *remarkable* price difference? (Yes, I know the disk makes
    not all the price difference.) As far as I understood from postings
    on this list, the remote screen using a X11 server should be no serious
    performance bottleneck.

    Third question:
    How about performance difference between MacIvory Model 1 and 2?
    I'm using a Model 1 here, and I'm not 100% content with its 
    performance (compared to our 3640s). An upgrade would require
    some $$10,000...

    Thanks for any comments - Stefan.

    Mail: Stefan Bernemann        ! Phone:  +49-231-7549233
	  c/o FhG IML Dortmund    ! Fax:    +49-231-7549211
	  Emil-Figge-Str. 75      ! Email:  berni@iml.fhg.de
	  D-4600 Dortmund 50, FRG !         ...!{uunet|mcavx}!unido!itwdo!berni