M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
9/5/2006 4:01:00 AM
Chad Perrin wrote:
> . . . this has prompted me to take a second look at SBCL. Is it
> entirely backward-compatible? Does it provide the same additional
> functionality (debugger, et cetera)? How, technically, do CMUCL and
> SBCL differ, in general?
>
> I ask in case you have the answers off the top of your head. If not, no
> biggie -- I'm on my way to look up more information about SBCL so I can
> compare them now.
I'm not sure about compatibility. CMUCL is Carnegie-Mellon University
Common Lisp and SBCL is Steel Bank Common Lisp. Carnegie made his money
in steel and Mellon made his money in banking, you see ...
CMUCL is kind of big and unwieldy and difficult to extend, so SBCL arose
to attempt to make things a little more "agile", if you will. For
example, there's probably no hope of a Windows port of CMUCL, but there
is one for SBCL.
As far as application speed is concerned, it's sort of a horse race
between GCL and CMUCL. GCL wins some benchmarks, CMUCL wins some, and
some are too close to call. Clisp is probably the most portable of the
bunch -- it runs on nearly every UNIX and is installed with CygWin. I
think there is a native Windows port too.
> Speaking of communities -- do you know of any mailing lists akin to
> ruby-talk, or open community websites akin to PerlMonks? What about
> beginner mailing lists? Extensive searching has turned up exactly one
> general-purpose Common Lisp mailing list thus far, and I don't know
> anything about the list yet beyond that.
Well ... I was on the CMUCL and SBCL developers' lists a while back, but
I don't think I've ever frequented a "Lisp Beginners" mailing list. I'd
start with "comp.lang.lisp" if you can stand the fact that most Lispniks
think there really isn't another real programming language.
I believed that myself a long time ago, until I discovered nobody was
paying people to code in Lisp but Fortran and assembler would earn you a
decent living.
I also think a PDF of most of the book "Practical Common Lisp" is on
line somewhere. I went and bought a hard copy anyway. It tells you how
to do 21st century stuff like web servers in Lisp. :)