Greetings! I also just noticed the cmulisp work. What is the plan?
Is work on gcl going to continue, or will it be replaced by cmulisp?
Or will one have the option of either? Is there an advantage to one
The work on GCL will definitely continue, and I feel (perhaps biased
of course) that GCL is the best for maxima if it is available on the
platform. Having full control over GCL we are guaranteed that it will
not change in ways undesirable for Maxima, and that it can be
optimized for it. I know GCL does not have any memory leaks, and it
is used in industry for example by the program verification, chip
verification people for doing things like proving the AMD k7 floating
point unit correct. This involved computations taking weeks to run on
powerful processors. GCL is faster on their programs and reliable.
GCL runs the basic tests in maxima about 3 times as fast as Clisp.
The latter is a very good lisp, but if gcl runs on the platform I
would prefer it. Personally I need the ability to single step line by
line at the lisp level in debugging maxima at the lisp level, and I
know how to do that in GCL (having written the code myself!), whereas
I will never be as competent in someone else's lisp.
However, that said, I think it is good to maintain compatibility with
other lisps, so that people can use features or platforms that may be
unique to those lisps, and I am very happy to see people contributing
patches and making sure it does run elsewhere.
And thank you for the quick fixes! They're now incorporated and
uploaded in the Debian package.
Thank YOU for making the debian package so up to date!!
And in answer to someone else's question, maxima once built
under gcl does not depend on gcl being on the system.
w