[LispSea] presentation requests

[Brandon J. Van Every]

theo nolastname wrote:
> Shat are the up/down sides
> to the various implementations?

Was that a Freudian slip?  :-)

I was quiet because I finally went to Yakima to gather signatures.  Back 
in Seattle for 1 day, hitting the road again tomorrow.  I've got a dog!  
Picked up a stray at the Yakima Walmart.  I may be going down to Oregon 
after this, so this could put my 3D demo plans behind.

I'd like to see a presentation of SBCL running on Windows.

I'd like to see system / shell scripting for the Windows user.  It is 
very common for Unix people to script this, script that, but culturally 
I have little sense of it as a Windows non-networked desktop user.  Are 
there things a scripting mentality could do for me at a systems level 
that I just am not thinking about?

I'd like to see a semi-decent game using Lisp or Scheme somehow.  There 
are a small number of open source ones out there, but I was never 
excited enough about any of 'em as far as code reuse to really dig 
through them.  It would be amusing to put someone else up to a dog and 
pony show.  Myself, I'm concentrating on my own code right now, to the 
extent I have time.  It'll be awhile before my own dog and pony shows 
are ready.

I'd like to see applications of Lisp in image processing, 3D graphics, 
and scientific visualization.

I'd like to see someone demonstrate a robot.

I've been intermittently interested in the Festival speech synthesis 
system.  http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/  I've seen almost 
no updating of their homepage over the past year though, which gave me 
little confidence in using their technology commercially for games.  
Festival uses a Scheme command interpreter.

I'd like to see an Artificial Life demo.

>
> 3. Information about the different dialects of lisp. 
> Advantages of scheme vs. common lisp vs. emacs lisp
> vs. arc (whenever it comes out) vs.
> what-ever-else-is-out-there.  Right now, I am leaning
> somewhat towards common lisp as the first lisp that I
> seriously want to start playing around with.  I really
> don't know anyone who does active lisp development,
> though, so it would be nice to actually talk to
> someone and find out some of the trade-offs
> language-wise between the various lisps.
>   

I certainly know a lot about this from a Windows game developer's 
standpoint.  I chose Chicken Scheme because (1) it's a Scheme-to-C 
compiler and I'm into performance, (2) it has an excellent C FFI and 
that's important to the performance oriented things I want to do, (3) it 
has some C++ capabilities although I'm not sure how far one can actually 
go with them, (4) every C FFI out there is different for every 
implementation, whether it's "Common" Lisp or not.  So there's no 
advantage to CL in this case.  You live or die by your implementation.

> 4. performance analysis.  How fast is lisp compared to
> xxx language?  How easy is it to embed/link c/assembly
> functions to lisp code?  What are some techniques for
> making lisp run faster?  A short tutorial on some of
> the more popular profilers avaliable might be good as
> well.
>   

The Shootout statistics are that every single natively compiled language 
out there is in the same rough order of magnitude of performance.  I 
don't just mean Lisp and Scheme, I mean others like OCaml, Clean, 
Haskell, Mercury, etc.  All the various scripted interpreters and byte 
compilers are in a different rough order of magnitude of performance, 
and it's significantly lower than the compiled languages.  If you want 
performance, get any natively compiled language and be happy.  After 
getting that baseline you should be picking in terms of support, 
usability, user community, price, open source if that's important to 
you, license, etc.  An advantage of an open source license is if you 
want to improve the performance, you can, if you're willing to do the work.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every