[Bese-devel] UCW Installation

[Julian Stecklina]

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:46:23 -0400
Waldo Rubinstein <waldo at trianet.net> wrote:

> I installed SBCL on Tiger from Darwinports, so I didn't really  
> compile it. The Darwin 'port' took care of that for me and I guess
> it didn't enable threads.

SBCL supports multithreading, but AFAIK only on Linux. We *BSD and
Darwin/MacOSX guys are out of luck for the moment. I have bought an
Allegro CL (which supports multi-threading) students license for
FreeBSD ($99) and it really "pays". ;) 

> Reading about so many different versions of Lisp concerns me with  
> regards to application compatibility. That's the reason I'm using  
> SBCL because it runs on Mac as well as Linux.

If you stick to one portability layer like, say, acl-compat, you should
be on the safe side.

> Because I'm new to Lisp, I wasn't sure if I developed an application  
> on my Mac, will I be able to run in on my Linux production  
> environment? I suppose that as long as my app conform to CL  
> Standards, I should be OK. However, reading on CLISP's web site, it  
> says it "implements most of the ANSI standard". Then, what open- 
> source Lisp versions are out there are conform to ANSI standards so  
> that applications "should" run unmodified across them?

All major CL implementations are quite ANSI conform. This includes
CMUCL, SBCL, ACL and CLISP. Even GCL and ECL which historically
implemented CLtL2 (which predates ANSI CL) are now very close to ANSI
CL. As a newbie it is very unlikely that you hit corners where these
implementations disagree. At least if you stay away from
anything that is "undefined" in the spec.

> May be you guys that have more experience can briefly suggest which  
> Lisps are more standards and that I can develop on Mac and deploy on  
> Linux.

I guess it makes sense to use OpenMCL on Mac and then switch to SBCL on
Linux. If you use threads (or other things outside the spec) directly,
consider the portability layer mentioned above.

Regards,
-- 
Julian Stecklina

Lisp nearing the age of 50 is the most modern language out
there. GC, dynamic, reflective, the best OO model extant including
GFs, procedural macros, and the only thing old-fashioned about it 
is that it is compiled and fast.   -- Kenny Tilton, comp.lang.python