Re: May Symbolics Thrive.....

[c.bridgewater@ic.ac.uk]

Hi everyone,

<< I saw the comments about SPARC vs 36xx and chuckled quietly to myself >>

Some of my building design software was ported off a SPARC1 with 8Mb of RAM
running POPLOG's Common Lisp to a 3630 with 2M words of main memory (courtesy
of Evans & Sutherland UK). No optimisation of code was done for the 3630 (I'm
still a fairly naive user), but the code ran between 4 and 5 times faster in
interpreted form and between 8 and 9 times faster for compiled versions. Much
of the SUN's cpu seemed to be taken up with running the network, whereas the 
3630 is a standalone machine. I'm dubious as to whether the minimal set up of
the 3630 could compete with the glorious-sounding specification of the ELC
mentioned in another post, but I've no complaints regarding speed or ease of
porting to and from Symbolics Common Lisp. The "Game of Life" example in the
programming tutorial booklet gives similar speed comparisons for the two
machine configurations I have access to. 

I agree with other folk who like the development environment on Symbolics, 
but then I haven't seen the Unix set-up mentioned (intense jealousy...).

Regards,

Colin


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*  Colin Bridgewater		     *    c.bridgewater@uk.ac.ic   * \   / *
*  Head Robot Wrangler		     * tel:+44-(0)71-589-5111x4842 *  \ /  *
*  Construction Robotics Research    * BE KIND TO SPIDERS & SNAILS * --*-- *
*  Department of Civil Engineering   *  -------------------------  *  / \  *
*  Imperial College, London, UK.     *  alias 'the happy hacker'   * /   \ *
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