Re: Looking for a few good programmers

[delisio@tc.pw.com (Jefferson DeLisio)]

Paul Pangaro (labrea!ATHENA.PANGARO.dialnet.symbolics.com!pan)
writes:

  ...
  Then, when all is (somewhat) well, "ported" to an MS-DOS -386 (yes, my
  friends, the reality of the practical world has finally forced my
  hand).
  That machine will have no more than 4 MB of RAM (currently an absolute
  constraint!), running the adventure game and all the user i/o,
  mouse/menu handling, graphics, simulations, etc., written in C++. 
  ...
  The possible ways to go are various (keep in LISP (use CLOE or IBUKI
  or...), use LISP translator, re-code from scratch in C++)

If 4 Mb is an absolute constraint I don't think CLOE will be an option.
The bare CLOE image for the PC is about 7Mb of disk space - a rough guide
we have found is that CLOE runs best when the amount of memory available is
similar to the image size (no swapping just GC). My application (~ 750K 
lines of code containing some CLIM code and a large KB - CLOS based) when 
added to CLOE weighs in as a 14Mb image. I can run that in 12Mb but it will 
go off on long paging/gc intervals from time to time. At 8Mb the intervals 
occur frequently and last an intolerable amount of time. My code could be 
made more CLOE efficient to be sure but I cannot imagine anything but the 
most trivial application running in 4Mb, which is a shame because CLOE is
very close to making the transition of code to PCs painless. Our latest
project conversion took only a few days to be up and running (though it
had already been tried out in Franz so it was fairly CommonLisp pure) and
our only headaches have been with CLIM but that is another story...


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