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Re: [Gcl-devel] General GCL quesions


From: Eric Merritt
Subject: Re: [Gcl-devel] General GCL quesions
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 08:44:13 -0700 (PDT)

Take my answers with a grain of salt, I am a newb too.
I didn't answer any of your debian questions. I don't
use debian so I have no insight there.

--- Chris Hall <address@hidden> wrote:
> I run Debian Woody, and believe strongly in free (as
> in speech)
> software.  I've got CMUCL 18e, SBCL 0.8.9, and the
> Debian stable CLISP
> 2.2.7 and GCL (2.5.0+cvs) packages.  

 2.5.0 is reasonable old.


> I prefer PostgreSQL for my database (Python stored
> procedures!).

eek, sounds like a performance killer. ;)
 
> 
> With that said, I have for some reason been
> particulary drawn to GCL,
> even after having read a *lot* of the (historical)
> posts on c.l.lisp
> where GCL is discussed. 

 In my experience the comments about GCL on c.l.l are
almost always negative. I am not really sure why. Sure
gcl has its problems, but no more or less then any
other FOSS implementation.

> To be honest, my attraction
> to GCL is against
> my better judgement - if I were to emphasize
> practicality, I think I
> would have to settle on CMUCL - 

 CMUCL has at least one critical problem that forces
me not to use it. It doesn't run on windows.
Personally I hate windows and use linux 99% of the
time, however, many of the people who use my projects
run windows exclusivly and can't or wont use linux. 
 
 GCL has at least two major pluses that interest me.
It has a really excellent C-FFI and its very cross
platform. These make it worth using in my book. The
fact that its nativly compiled is just icing on the
cake.

> And
> if it weren't for GCL's stated intention of gaining
> ANSI compliance,

 its not just an intention, camm and the guys have
been working very hard to get GCL complient. Right now
GCL passes the vast majority of the tests in the ansi
test suite.

> I'd be in a real pickle since CLISP - the only other
> 'free as in
> speech' lisp of which I am aware - doesn't compile
> to native code,
> which is a 'must' for me.

 I have a problem with this too.

> So - to my questions:
> 
> * Is there no GCL users' newsgroup/mailing list?  I
> couldn't find one.
>   It seems such a group or list is de rigeur, so I'm
> curious about
>   this.  Is there a MAXIMA group where people
> discuss GCL?

Hmm, good question. I have never seen one, but it
makes sense that there should be. 
 

> * How may one determine the status of ANSI
> compliance, for example for
>   version 2.5.0+cvs, the current Debian stable
> version?  This would be
>   *extremely* useful in determining debugging
> strategies when trying
>   to load generally available packages.

 Once again 2.5.0 is old. I don't have a clue as to
its level of complience.
  
> 
> * How much of GCL is written in lisp?  Would it be
> worth it for me to
>   get the lisp sources?

 I think a good portion, if not the majority of gcl is
in lisp.
  
> * Is GCL meant to be a niche product - MAXIMA/ACL2
> support + Tcl/Tk?
>   If so, shouldn't that be stated somewhere?  Or are
> the GCL
>   developers intending on making GCL more broadly
> usable?  What is
>   being done in this respect?

 MAXIMA/ACL2 seem to be gcl's primary customer and
hence get allot of attention, but gcl is a full blown,
well implemented lisp. So I don't think its a niche
product.
 
> * What lisp would the GCL developers recommend for
> Debian users who
>   would like to write web apps (at *least* to access
> postgres
>   databases) in a truly free lisp?  Please keep in
> mind that this, for
>   me at least, requires some sort of
> multi-processing - I'm fine with
>   select-based stuff for the web side, in fact I
> prefer it, but
>   databases usually require full-on threads - and
> AFAIK, neither GCL
>   or CLISP seems to do either type of
> multi-processing.

 At the moment gcl doesn't have any multitasking at
all. I don't the devs have any plans for it anytime
soon, though it has been discussed.

> 
> Am I wrong in thinking that neither of the truly
> free lisps is going
> to be really suitable for such common tasks any time
> soon?  Or are
> people going to suggest that I write/port threading,
> a web server and
> postgres support?

 Threading is going to be a pain, I am not sure any
newb is capable of implementing true preemtive
threading in gcl. I have been playing with a
cooperative multi-tasking library, but that wont fit
your needs at all becuase blocking io will still block
everything. 

 That said, python's twisted matrix has managed to
implement database multiple io in a single thread
(including database io) perhaps it would be possible
to port this. 

 There is no  need to port a webserver, gcl has really
excellent integration with C. I would suspect that you
could interface with apache's mod_c very easily if
mod_lisp didn't work.

 I am not aware of any current libs for postgresql
support in gcl. This sucks I know, but it would
probably be no more then a few ours work to integrate
with the postgresql client libs. The C support in gcl
is really quite good. 

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