Subject: space efficient CLISP?

From: "J`o'rg-Cyril H`o'hle" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 16:41:15 +0200

Hi,

Eric Marsden says in
http://www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/index.html

 CLISP (a space-efficient Common Lisp implementation)

Todays HD and RAM seem cheap and people start using the full-blown CLISP
including compiler and CLOS for scripting purposes.

I'm wondering if there's still interest in sharing/contributing
knowledge about making CLISP really small.

I don't intend to reduce the C part (lisp.run) e.g. by throwing out
complex numbers, supporting only one floating point format instead of 4
or other modification to the C files.  But a lot could be gained in the
past by e.g. throwing out some Lisp (not loading all .fas files), taking
advantage of the fact that ~500 functions are written in C. For example,
the compiler and possibly CLOS and dependent files were not necessary in
the past, lispinit.mem then became half its normal size.  Many
applications don't use the compiler at run-time, or DESCRIBE, or even
FORMAT (partly thanks to the format compiler)!

One could even build an image containing the own apllication's .fas
files and only few needed parts of the distributed .fas files --
depending on the application.

I'm not sure if it's still possible to omit CLOS from the current CLISP,
as more and more internal parts make indirect use of it, the condition
system being the most important, DESCRIBE coming to mind and more.

If you're interested in this topic, feel free to get in touch with me
(hoehle at tzd.telekom.de) or use clisp-list.  Or is this a matter of
the past, given that most people now use Linux and take advantage of
CLISP's ability to store part of the .mem file in read-only, thus
storage shared among multiple invocations?

Regards,
	Jörg Höhle

---

From: Eric Marsden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 13:40:09 +0200

>  CLISP (a space-efficient Common Lisp implementation)

I am happy with CLISP's current memory use; it works fine on my relatively
old home machine, where CMUCL is unusable. I wouldn't want to go without
CLOS. Reducing the size may be useful for some applications (CLISP on
PalmPilot :), but note that systems such as Python have similar resource
requirements.

Personally I'm more interested in stuff like dynamic linking (I'm rewriting
my dl module to use libffi for parameter passing instead of a home-brewed
stack, for much better portability), interfacing to Gtk and databases,
networking libraries, multithreading, CORBA, CLEmacs ... <ahem>

-- 
Eric Marsden
It's elephants all the way down

---

From: Sam Steingold <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Apr 1999 09:07:41 -0400

>>>> In message <[email-masked]>
>>>> On the subject of "Re: space efficient CLISP?"
>>>> Sent on Mon, 12 Apr 1999 04:44:44 -0700 (PDT)
>>>> Honorable Eric Marsden <[email-masked]> writes:
 >> 
 >> CLEmacs ... <ahem>

Aha!  I am not the only one dreaming of it! :-)
did you look at closure?
http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/~unk6/

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.goems.com/~sds) running RedHat5.2 GNU/Linux
Micros**t is not the answer.  Micros**t is a question, and the answer is Linux,
(http://www.linux.org) the choice of the GNU (http://www.gnu.org) generation.
I don't have an attitude problem. You have a perception problem.