[Ecls-list] Using Femlisp with ECL / Bug reports

[Nicolas Neuss]

Hello,

I am just evaluating if it is possible to use ECL reasonably for my PDE
toolbox Femlisp.  My requirements are fast floating point operations and
quite some ANSI compatibility.

At the moment I am stuck with the following issures (CVS version of ECL):

---

1. The CVS version of SLIME does not work.  *inferior-lisp* ends with the
message:

  ;;; Loading "/home/neuss/CL-HOME/elisp/slime/nregex.lisp"
  ;;; Loading "/home/neuss/CL-HOME/elisp/slime/swank-ecl.lisp"
  Module error: Don't know how to REQUIRE SOCKETS.
  Broken at REQUIRE.
  SWANK-BACKEND>>

---

2. I have problems with logical pathnames.  I am using:

  (defvar *femlisp-pathname*
    (make-pathname :directory (pathname-directory *load-truename*)))

  (let ((directory (pathname-directory *femlisp-pathname*)))
    (setf (logical-pathname-translations "FEMLISP")
          `(("**;*.*.*"
             ,(make-pathname :directory `(, at directory :wild-inferiors)
                             :name :wild :type :wild :version :wild)))))

  (load "femlisp:femlisp-config.lisp")

and get an error

Filesystem error with pathname #P"/home/neuss/CL-HOME/femlisp/femlisp-config.lisp".
Either the file cannot be accessed or the pathname is not a valid one.
Broken at LOAD.
FL.START>>

However, PROBE-FILE works:

  (probe-file #P"/home/neuss/CL-HOME/femlisp/femlisp-config.lisp")
  -> #P"/home/neuss/CL-HOME/femlisp/femlisp-config.lisp"

---

3. Loading my floating point performance test

  <http://sit.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/~neuss/WWWPages/misc/mflop.lisp>

with (load (compile-file "mflop.lisp")) yields

DDOT-long: 158.84 MFLOPS
DDOT-short: 466.84 MFLOPS
DAXPY-long: 7.84 MFLOPS
DAXPY-short: 7.63 MFLOPS

The first two values are fine, but the other ones are much worse than GCL
which gives:

DDOT-long: 189.04 MFLOPS
DDOT-short: 511.31 MFLOPS
DAXPY-long: 99.42 MFLOPS
DAXPY-short: 447.39 MFLOPS

Why?

Thank you, Nicolas.