[asdf-devel] Which are the highest-maintenance CL implementations?

[Faré]

Xach was deriding on twitter my inserting a last-minute patch to ASDF
for the sake of Genera compatibility. Sure it's a pain to support, but
is it *that* much worse than other implementations?

grep '#[-+]' asdf.lisp > /tmp/a
for i (abcl allegro clisp clozure cmu cormanlisp ecl gcl genera
lispworks mcl sbcl scl xcl) { echo "$(grep -c $i < /tmp/a) $i" } |
sort -nr

22 scl
21 genera
20 sbcl
20 lispworks
19 abcl
18 cmu
18 clisp
18 allegro
16 gcl
16 ecl
15 xcl
15 cormanlisp
13 clozure
12 mcl

All implementations seem to be in the same ballpark, as far as hacks
required to support them go. Yes, Genera is old and quirky. I still
works better than either GCL (that I've stopped supporting, because I
can't compile a version recent enough to not have the multiple-value
compile bug), or CormanLisp, for instance.

Indeed, supporting 14 implementations is a huge pain. I don't feel
like doing it again. And I feel less and less like keeping doing it.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Engineering is not the art of constructing. It is rather the art of
not constructing: or, it is the art of doing well with one dollar
what any bungler can do with two.  — Arthur Mellen Wellington