On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>
wrote:
> ...there is not yet a foreign function interface which accomodates
> all of the "officially" supported Lisp implementations for Maxima.
>
> We could probably use CFFI. http://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/
> That might imply dropping GCL, which wouldn't bother me too much,
> although I don't know if there is a replacement for GCL on Windows
> which is at least as capable as GCL.
>
Windows, Linux/x86, and MacOS X are surely the major platforms Maxima runs
on. Having full, good-quality implementations of Maxima on those platforms
is much more important than on (say) AIX or HP-UX. (But of course we don't
have any statistics on the platforms users are running Maxima on, and no way
to get reasonably unbiased ones.)
I have no particular preference for any Lisp implementation, but a basic
criterion would seem to be that it be well-supported on our most popular
platforms. I don't see how we could even imagine dropping GCL if we are
unsure that there is a competent replacement for it on Windows.
-s