On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 10:33:24AM -0800, Tracy R Reed wrote:
There aren't a lot of Common Lisp implementations, at least not that are
still around. For the most part, people seem to choose either Allegro or
Lispworks. Both are basically too expensive for an individual, hobbyist
developer.
Why would they choose Allegro or Lispworks over SBCL or CLisp or CMUCL?
(any other Common Lisp implementations I'm missing? I don't know if this is
a lot but it's more than a couple.)
Because they're a lot more mature. Unless you're using Debian or Gentoo,
it can be quite a pain to even just install/build SBCL or CMUCL. Clisp can
be too slow.
I've mostly been using the pre-release of 1.2 of Clozure Common Lisp
(formerly OpenMCL). It has the same kind of feel that Allegro or Lispworks
has as far as the basics and the core working. With the others, I seem to
run into a lot of auxiliary stuff that just doesn't quite work right, like
debuggers and stuff.
I hadn't thought about all of the C implementations before but you are
right about there being a lot. ANSI C would seem to be a smaller standard
than the CL standard isn't it? Perhaps it is easier to make conforming
implementations and compatible libraries?
C is a much easier language to implement. C++ on the other hand, probably
not much different. But C++ is a lot more popular, so more possible
revenue to motivate people to work on compilers.
For some reason, I think people are also turned off by the incremental
development. Somehow, they associate incremental compilation with an
interpreter, and think that it will be slow.
David
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