Re: Looking for a few good programmers

[gooch@sw-sw.dialnet.symbolics.com (William D. Gooch)]

    Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1992 12:00 CST
    From: delisio@tc.pw.com (Jefferson DeLisio)

    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...

I think you are right, although it is certainly possible (and a pretty
good idea) to do your own memory management and turn CLOE's GC off.  I
ran MCC's SIGCHI-90 demo this way (actually, between demo runs I ran the
GC, but otherwise I kept it turned off - the code didn't cons a lot
anyway), and it prevented those annoying unpredictable delays that would
make a lot of people just walk away.  This approach would be worthwhile,
and possibly important, for a lisp-based application running on any PC
software platform.