On Apr 21, 6:09 pm, root <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<SNIP>
Hi Tim,
> > The GCL-devel mailing list has on average about 5-6 messages a month
> > during the last couple of months, except for a bunch of messages in
> > January about people trying to build GCL from cvs.
>
> You claim that you pass problem reports upstream but I don't see many
> Sage postings to the GCL mailing list. Camm, the GCL maintainer, has
> always been very responsive and effective in his replies. But, like
> you, he needs good, clear, effective bug reports.
Yes, I can certainly agree with you on that one. Detailed bug reports
are required to get anything fixed.
But I get paid to do a job:
* port Sage to Solaris
* support Sage on Linux/Itanium
* port Sage to Windows
While I am at it I do a number of other Sage related jobs:
* play a release manager
* hunt down memory leaks in general
* port Sage to FreeBSD
* port Sage to Linux/Sparc
* port Sage to Linux/PPC64
When I am done with the above [i.e. in the "evening" ;)] I would
really, really like to do:
* audit Singular for memory leaks with its test suite and fix those
bugs ;)
* get deeply into PolyBoRi and help dealing with their memory
management issues
* compile gcc 4.4CVS [or whatever is next] and make Sage build with
it. After fixing all the bugs push them upstream [I did many of those
with gcc 4.3 about six months ago, but only finished pushing the fixes
in 3.0]
The above three tasks are something that gives me credit with my peers
and would certainly benefit me and my reputation in the CAS community
[at least with many algebra people ;)].
Now let's contrast this with gcl:
* gcl is a mature project, i.e. it should just work out of the box
most of the time
* It *should* build on the vast majority of platforms that it claims
it supports. Reality: there are many, many problems - and that is with
me not being an ass and deliberately doing something stupid on
purpose
Looking at the above lists you will hopefully understand that I have
no interest in working on gcl since doing efficient bug reporting
would require that I get familiar with the code. I would likely get
into it since I could fix many of those bugs myself. But since I have
no interest in lisp and would like to spend my time on projects where
I would I personally know the people and share common goals with I
will not do that.
To put it nicely: gcl is "stagnating". The last release was in 2005
[not 5 years ago like I mistakenly claimed]. If the lisp community
would be a large thriving community *I* wouldn't have to do anything
about that issue, but you would likely have had some release since
2005 and many of the problems I saw would have already been solved,
i.e. it would "just work". Am I wrong to assume that the gcl community
does not have access to a reasonably large number of non-Linux boxen?
I spend a huge amount of time on any exotic and not so exotic build
problem with Sage, hence I expect other projects to do the same thing.
If that is not the case I will not use their code and due to the
insane number of issues with clisp, gcl and so on I have drawn the
conclusion that Sage without a lisp dependency in its core [i.e. code
I am getting paid to support] would be a better Sage. That doesn't
mean that Sage will not be very accommodating to say Maxima, Axiom,
FriCAS and OpenAxiom via an optional lisp package, but as long as they
depend on lisp [forever would be my guess here] I do not see a chance
for them to stay in the core or become part of the core long term.
Prove me wrong: Get gcl to build out of the box on various Linuxes
[with gcc], Solaris 9, 10 with Sun Forte, OSX 10.4, 10.5 with XCode
[no stupid MacPorts here] and Windows with MSVC and I will be the
first guy to help you out. I see ecls potentially in that role, but as
long as it isn't supported in Maxima I see no urgent reason to spend
any work on that.
But I have dealt with the ecls maintainer, both by reporting problems
and submitting patchlets, so I know he is up to the job. He for
example already uses MSVC on Windows to build ecls, so he is far ahead
of any other Open Source lisp AFAIK. That gives me hope since his
goals and understanding of the importance to support non-gcc compilers
are very much aligned to my personal opinions.
> I think you'd feel the same frustrations with Python if you compiled
> Python from scratch for every platform. You ship "sources" but assume
> that the python language exists and is compatible, which is not likely
> to be the case when 3.0 arrives. If you can assume the python language,
> why can't you assume the lisp language? If you can't assume the lisp
> language, why can you assume the python language?
As others have pointed out already we do build Python from source.
Once Python 2.6 comes out [in parallel with Python 3K] we will migrate
first to 2.6 and then likely to 3.0 at some point. But since we build
Python we control our own destiny here.
> Having spent a fair portion of my life porting software, I understand
> the frustrations you feel. And having spent the bulk of my life using
> Lisp I "get" the get-rid-of-lisp pushback. But a lot of astonishingly
> good computer algebra exists in lisp (we won't discuss the reasons).
> Reproducing Axiom's "million-things-of-code" in Python would be no
> small task, especially since some of the experts are dead.
Well, many things are available in non-lisp CASes and many of them are
in Sage, so it isn't that Sage without Axiom isn't viable [not that
you implied that]. If a sufficient number of people want Lisp to
remain a significant player in the CAS world [and computer science in
general] it will be so. We are not forcing you to use Python or Sage.
This is all about what tool gets the job done for you and in your case
it is Axiom ;)
> Tim
Cheers,
Michael
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