Richard Fateman wrote: > Hi Michael: Hi Richard,
> Out of curiosity, I visited the ECL home page. It is my understand that the sf website is mostly out of date, so I never took a closer look. The current state can be found in a presentation at http://ecls.wiki.sourceforge.net/space/showimage/eclm2008.pdf > I would be fairly surprised if this worked well for Maxima, for SAGE, in > spite of some signs of life. The paramount reason to attempt to go with ecl instead of gcl or clisp [only self-hosted, build from source, Open Source lisps need apply :)] was that it has compiler support for all our current and intended port targets. gcl has build issues galore [2.6.8cvs as well as 2.7cvs], clisp has problems with gcc 4.2 and 4.3, but that was discussed at great length in the recent "Project" thread in sage-devel. > It is based on "a bytecodes compiler and interpreter". with a translator to > C. It uses the Gnu Multiprecision > Library, which suggests to me that all short-integer arithmetic, the most > common kind, > will be slow and bulky. Probably, but for the above reasons we do not have a whole lot of choice. So the Sage project prefers a working common lisp implementation that is slower in relative terms to a non-working much faster one. We do not want the user to provide some common lisp implementation since a lot of non-technical users, especially on Windows, would then take a look at Sage and move on to the next system. > The benchmark section says the competitive CLISP is astonishingly fast in > comparison with ECL. Those numbers seem to be outdated. The above linked presentation has some comparisons IIRC of more current code. A couple months back Waldek Herbish started building FriCAS on top of ecl and over the course of a couple weeks ecl's performance for pretty printing code and some other things was improved dramatically. So I am convinced that the ecl maintainer [Juan, whom I CCed] is more than interested in solving any performance issue and while he might be busy with his own work other people have supplied patches to solve performance problems. So IMHO there is much more life in the ecl community than the other open source lisp communities. Right now about 2/3rds of the downloads of Sage seem to be by Windows users and as Sage will hopefully be used by more and more less technical people the ratio will likely go up. Download statistics from sf for Maxima indicate that the vast majority of Maxima users who download Maxima directly actually use Windows [the ratio seems to be about 10:1 last time I looked], so I consider a well working lisp on Windows important. Obviously many people on Linux or *BSD use the distribution/ports provided Maxima, so they never show up at the sf download statistics, but if 40,000 people chose to download Maxima for Windows it seems to me that a substantial number of Maxima users are on Windows, so it ought to be well supported, even if they were to represent only a small percentage of overall Maxima users. > It has a "simple conservative mark & sweep garbage collector" which means > it will be very bad for > long-running jobs. The garbage collector in the current ecl release is pluggable and boehm is used per default [IIRC it is the only choice at the moment]. I am fairly clueless about the different garbage collection libraries out there, so I do not know how boehm compares to what you would expect. It was my impression that boehm is widely used, but that obviously wouldn't make it a good implementation ;). > It seems to be lacking tools for collecting information on memory use etc. Judging from the presentation it is possible. But I know too little to form an informed opinion. > Of course, with enough effort anything can be made from anything in a Turing > sense. Yes :) > Regards > RJF Cheers, Michael > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael.Abshoff >> Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2008 8:53 PM >> To: sage-devel@googlegroups.com >> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; maxima list >> Subject: Re: [Maxima] [sage-devel] compiling Maxima by ECL >> >> Robert Dodier wrote: >>> Hello, >> Hi, >> >>> I have gotten Maxima (current CVS head + ECL-specific changes) >>> compiled by ECL (current CVS head, release 0.9j won't work). >>> I committed the ECL-specific stuff on the branch >> .... snip > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
