Greetings! Believe me, I've been thinking a lot about this question
before deciding to volunteer for this. In my mind, there is
sufficient reason to continue GCL, for the following reasons:
1) Very important that maxima have a *open*, non-commercial, stable,
and fast lisp on which to run. IMHO, one can never count on
corporations to safeguard the future of software, but an interested
volunteer development effort can preserve working code at a high
level of capability, and *for the primary benefit of the users, who
are often the coders* over a long period of time. This saves us
all a lot of effort by preserving the investment we expend in
learning to use the software in the first place. I learned
emacs/gcc, etc. in grad school 15 years ago, and am still reaping
the benefits of the time I put in doing so.
2) As compared to Clisp, GCL is much faster, and is likely to remain
so due to its design.
3) As compared to cmulisp, GCL is potentially much more portable, and
is likely to remain so due to its design.
4) In sum, it really just boiled down to the design of GCL. Compiling
to C, and relying on C compilers to provide speed and portability
is just a good idea, IMHO, and I'd hate to see that wasted.
Take care,
dan.stanger@ieee.org writes:
> In a previous message to the list, I saw a bench mark that indicated
> that clisp was only about 30% slower then gcl. Wouldnt our time
> be better served by building the stuff in clisp that gcl has,
> which I thought was tk support, and then putting our time into cmucl
> and making it work on more platforms? clisp is a gpl'd product also,
> works on many more platforms than gcl. Plus, it implements CLOS,
> and many more features then gcl.
> Dan Stanger
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
>
>
--
Camm Maguire camm@enhanced.com
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." -- Baha'u'llah