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

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 19:26 +0200, Nicolas Neuss wrote:
> Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll <lisp at arrakis.es> writes:
> 
> > You need TCP sockets for slime to work. Configure ECL with the flag
> > --with-tcp and rebuild it.
> 
> Now it does not start up any more:
> 
> $ ecl
> Unrecoverable error:
> Lisp initialization error.

This is strange. Configuring --with-tcp and without it should make no
real difference, as it only decides whether to build some extra module
or not (the code in the library for it is minimal). Did you remove the
_build_ directory before configuring again?
> 
> > Fixed in CVS. My latest commit to fix translation problems when :VERSION
> > = :WILD was a total disaster born out of the lack of sleep.
> 
> Are CVS changes immediately visible to others?  I probably did not get them
> yet, because the problem still remains.

There is a delay for anonymous access. However one my test machines uses
the anonymous repository and it built and tested successfully. See
Redhat 8.0 in http://ecls.sourceforge.net/status.html

> > I am looking now into the output of the compiler. Most likely, the array
> > operations are not being inlined. However, I would never implement these
> > operations in lisp itself, but rather link against an optimized BLAS
> > library. I do that even when programming in C/C++.
> 
> OK, but at some points I have to do other FP operations than BLAS.  If an
> implementation fails to optimize those simple loops, it will probably fail
> also for the more complicated cases.  Furthermore, having those routines in
> Lisp adds quite some portability, because FFI is not standardized.

UFFI is a defacto standard, which is supported by most Common-Lisp
implementations. However, even though you are right and UFFI will not be
capable of, for instance, retreiving the pointer of a single-float
array, typically the code that this adds is minimal and one can design a
good interface on top of this. I think Matlisp does this.

Incidentally, I had a look at your code and indeed an array operation is
not being inlined and thus spoils all the performance gain from unboxing
the real numbers. I will work into that.

Regards,

Juanjo