Subject: Re: LISP for Windows
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/12/12
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3122432390693869@naggum.no>

* Ian Wild <ian@cfmu.eurocontrol.be>
| I do a lot of work at the Unix command line, piping stuff from here to
| there though this and that, with the odd rerouting through A and B.
| Writing my filters in Scheme is a ton easier than perl, awk, bash, or
| whatever.  I couldn't /possibly/ use CL here - the load time alone would
| kill me.

  on my dual 400MHz Pentium II machine with 512M RAM, Emacs and Allegro
  Common Lisp start in 0.04 real-time seconds, mostly because Emacs has to
  talk the X protocol with the slower 50MHz SPARCstation 2 that is still my
  X server, while bash starts in 0.001 seconds.  I tend to start Emacs and
  Allegro CL once every week or so, while there have been more than 8000
  invocations of bash since my system last booted 5 days ago.  speaking of
  which, it took several _minutes_ to boot after a prolonged power failure
  (I love the cold of winter -- NOT!), with all the disks it has to check
  and all the other silly things it has to do, but I still don't count the
  boot time when I measure the running time of my programs.  isn't that odd?

  oh, by the way, I have tried scsh.  it took 0.7 seconds to load while in
  the disk cache on this system.  I think I'll fault Scheme for that today.

  I hope this was almost as silly as your conjecture, but illuminating.

#:Erik
-- 
  man who cooks while hacking eats food that has died twice.