Subject: Re: Emacs and CL (was Re: More LispOS talk (was Re: Lisp subverts the world (was Re: ints vs fixnums (was Re: Java ... (was Re: ... (was Re: ...))))))
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/03/03
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3129441516179845@naggum.no>

* Sam Steingold <sds@goems.com>
| could you please be more specific?

  fire up GUILE, CLISP, and any other Common Lisp implementations you have
  at hand.  run them for a while.  do real stuff.  watch how much system
  memory the heaps consume.  watch GUILE lose.  fire up 100 copies of each
  of them, and watch code space being insignificant compared to heap space.

  the U in GUILE is for Ubiquitous.  there's going to be _many_ copies of
  the GUILE heap on a system, one in each process, just like the C library.
  in contrast, you're unlikely to exhibit the same behavior with a Common
  Lisp system, which users load stuff into instead of running a new process
  with its own heap all the time.

  the problem with retrofitting a Lisp or Scheme onto Unix is that Unix
  really is a C programming environment, and using the C mindset when
  building Lisp or Scheme applications or systems on top of it loses.  the
  same is true of any other programming language with an environment that
  takes the role of Unix for C.

#:Erik