On Nov 23, 2008, at 1:17 PM, John Cremona wrote: > > 2008/11/23 mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> >> On Nov 23, 1:03 pm, "John Cremona" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >>> Before I jump on the bandwagon, are there any arguments at all >>> against >>> this? >> >> Not that I can see. The main reason we chose clisp over gcl for >> example that it worked better than any other lisp implementation >> supported by Maxima (and I am being generous when I write 'working' >> here). There are other lisp implementations out there that support >> building Maxima and are even faster than ecl for many things, i.e. >> sbcl for example, but those are not self hosted, i.e. without a lisp >> compiler you cannot compile sbcl. Since back in the day when Maxima >> was added to Sage it did not support ecl the only choice was clisp >> and >> considering the number of build and run time problems we had it is a >> miracle that it took so long to dump clisp. To add to the list of >> clisp issues: Most gcc 4.x releases lead to Maxima segfaulting when >> clisp is build with more than "-O0", so performance is worst than it >> could be. On Solaris/Sparc *no* gcc after gcc 3.3 seems to result >> in a >> working clisp binary. I have also played with clisp 2.46 and when I >> run Maxima's test suite under valgrind I found a couple bad things >> that clisp was doing. Unfortunately I no longer have that test setup >> and I must have deleted the valgrind logs, so I never reported the >> issue upstream. >> >> One problem with ecl is that it requires a working gcc when you want >> to compile lisp code, but the disadvantage here is greatly out weight >> by the fact that all the bits we need from Maxima "just work" - so I >> couldn't care less about the lisp compilation problems. I would >> assume >> that the number of people installing Sage to use it for its lisp are >> about zero :) >> >> So in the end that leads me to believe that the Sage project is >> gaining here by replacing clisp by ecl. >> >>> I can see the benefits, and the only cost is in someone other >>> than me making it work...which makes it rather easy to vote +! >> >> Yes, I always vote +1 on nice things other people do :) > > Thanks for taking the time to explain, so I can now confidently agree > with earlier voters and say: > > +1!
+1 Makes sense to me. - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
