On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 1:13 PM, mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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).
Indeed. clisp was the *only* lisp that actually worked at all on the Sage-supported platforms. -- William > 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. Definitely! > >> 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 :) > Well you're the "other person" this time Michael :-). >> John > > Cheers, > > Michael > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
