Subject: Runtime determination of share directories?
From: Stavros Macrakis
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:05:08 -0500
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Michael Abshoff
<michael.abshoff at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Aleksej Saushev wrote:
> Well, AFAI understand gcl is the only lisp supported by Maxima that does
> not support ffi ... so if I had to made a decision as an outsider it would
> be a no brainer...
I agree entirely about the great value of FFI.
> ... provided ecl worked (which I believe it does).
The one big issue I'm aware of is that ECL coredumps on stack overflow
in compiled code rather than giving a clean exception. This is a
serious problem, since infinite recursions are not an uncommon kind of
error in code.
> The ecl maintainer has been extremely responsive to issues in ecl exposed by
> Maxima as well as been more that willing to fix performance bottle necks in
> case they were pointed out to him.
He may be responsive, but in this case, his response was "won't fix".
In an email exchange last year, he said that he didn't plan to fix the
coredump problem because it would require platform-dependent code.
> Obviously at least some people have a emotional connection to gcl due to the history between Maxima and gcl.
I have no emotional connection to GCL. (If anything, I have an
emotional connection to MacLisp! :-) ) I simply want an underlying
Lisp which works on Windows and doesn't coredump.
-s