Rainer Joswig  <joswig@lisp.de> wrote:
+---------------
| Currently I think the biggest gap in the native compiled
| Common Lisp world is a native compiler to the ARM processor.
| I know no native code compiler for the ARM processor.
| Why is that? I find that kind of surprising. Is the ARM
| processor kind of problematic for Lisp? 
+---------------

Not the processor, no. At a recent PPoE, I did some embedded
coding on an XScale (Intel's ARM5+extras) in a combination of
C & assembler. It's a pretty darned clean machine. I liked
programming in ARM assembler almost as much as the DEC PDP-10.
[That's high praise from me, FWIW. ;-} ]

+---------------
| There are lots of machines running on ARM:
| http://www.arm.com/markets/mobile_solutions/app.html
| http://www.arm.com/markets/home_solutions/app.html
| 
| (I should mention that it should be possible to use
| some non-native-compiled Common Lisp on ARM).
+---------------

I suspect it's not the ARM per se, but the kind of *system*
people tend to put ARMs into that's the issue for CL. It's
probably the case that a basic "cold load" of a typical full
CL would stress the memory limits of most of those platforms...
and then memory usage goes up from there once you start running.

But it's an interesting idea. [Hmmm... CMUCL on an ARM... Yum! ;-} ]


-Rob

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