In article <8gyba0yt2p.fsf@galapagos.cse.psu.edu>,
Scott Schwartz <schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu.NO-SPAM> wrote:
>
>Olin Shivers <shivers@lambda.ai.mit.edu> writes:
>| If by "simulating a lisp machine" you mean providing the benefits of a modern
>| programming language
>
>No, I don't mean that.
>
>| What you want from your tools is a pay-as-you-go accounting. If you write
>some
>| tiny, little program in Scheme or C that uppercases stdin to stdout, you'd
>| like it to compile to a tiny, little binary. If you run an emacs written in
>| Scheme or C, you accept that it is going to require some memory. This is
>| independent of language choice.
>
>However, lots of programs are unjustifyably bloated. Sometimes it is
>because of poor quality of implementation. Sometimes it is because
>the langauge being used is inefficient. Sometimes both. It's wrong
>to just assume that bloat is paid for by the features of the langauge
>or the implementation; that's hardly even true in libc anymore. As I
>noted before, Oberon is a fraction of the size of Emacs and blows it
>away in every respect.
>
>| Note that this is purely an implementation issue. Anyone with the time and
>| skill could sit down and make separate compilation happen for Scheme 48. It
>| isn't really a design issue. In principal, you could pay-as-you-go with this
>| setup.
>
>But, as you point out, most people who build scheme implementations
>are not rewarded for building practical systems, so your conjecture
>remains academic. On the other hand, the people who sell common lisp
>haven't enjoyed notable success either, so maybe it's not so easy
>after all.
>
>(I suspect they'd all have better luck if their standard development
>platform was a nice 4M 386 with a 100M disk running linux.)
>
>| How cheap do you want? In Scsh, the underlying system is a function call
>| away.
>
>Roughly speaking, I want to replace every program in /bin, /usr/bin,
>/usr/ucb, and so on, with an a.out generated by a Scheme (or ML)
>compiler (or interpreter, if the original was a shell script), and I
>want it to be within 10% of the size and speed and working set of the
>original (shared libraries disallowed, for easier measurement).
|