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