On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 07:32, Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> ...The maxima image is of the order of 40 Megs...
>
It is a mystery to me why Maxima takes so much memory (on Windows it's 16
MB, but that's still a lot). After all, Macsyma in 1982 (which is 90% of
what Maxima is today) ran in something like 150kW (36-bit). One Cons cell
took one word; assuming 8-byte Cons cells, and assuming proportional
expansion of machine code (which seems excessive), that's the equivalent of
1.2 MB.
Then again, MacLisp took something like 50kW and a GCL command line takes
5.6 MB -- don't know how much of that is extra Common Lisp functionality,
how much is 'optional' components being preloaded (the compiler?
documentation?), how much is less economical coding style (MacLisp was
written in very tight assembler), and how much is simply larger default
heap size.
The good news is of course that by *current* standards, 16MB is tiny; the
trivial game FreeCell takes 100MB (!). I can buy 8GB RAM for $50, and it
is 1000x faster than the Macsyma group's 2MB RAM that cost $100,000+.
-s