[Ecls-list] Help needed, really

[David Brown]

On Sun, Jan 02 2011, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:42 PM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll

> Of course, the number of combinations will be always limited, in practice.
> I never asked for an unlimited combinations.

It seems to me that you have.  Because it targets C, ECL is very easy to
make run on new targets, even ones that Juanjo has no access to.  For
example, I have unpacked the sources to ECL on an ARM-based Linux
target, configured and built it.  Aside from some software that, for no
real good reason, doesn't work when it doesn't find one of the x86
features, most stuff just works with it.

There are many different modes and configurations that I could run ARM
in, from drastic things such as endianness changes, or instruction sets
used, to variants in how floating point registers are passed.  All of
this is transparent to ECL.

On the other hand, the only other Lisp system I know of that works on
ARM, Clozure CL, has explicit support for one exact configuration.  It
appears to be a different configuration than I have, since the delivered
executable just drops into a debugger.  It is easy for them to add
feature definitions for this, since they spent a significant amount of
effort writing a code generator for the new CPU.

Most Lisp compilers take significant amounts of work to make them build
on a different configuration.  ECL often just works.  Asking it to try
and deduce a bunch of information about that configuration would make it
much less portable than it is.

David