Re: Why Lisp instead of Scheme?

cstacy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote in
news:uhdib23ne.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> "Brandon J. Van Every" <mylastnameruntogether@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> writes:
> [why I'm using Bigloo Scheme]
>>
>> - it's a high performance Scheme -> C compiler, thus appropriate
>> to my 3D graphics and game AI problems.
>> - I'm broke and it's open source.
>> - I'm on Windows and there's no open source Lisp compiler available
>
> You might consider GNU Common Lisp (GCL).

GCL compiles to machine-independent bytecode, not native code. I
suppose I am guilty of not fully specifying what I meant by a
'compiler', but in my mind it always means something that produces
native code. In other people's minds it doesn't, but again my problem
domains are 3D graphics and game AI, where native compiled performance
is highly desireable.

On Windows it relies on Cygwin, which means it's "not really Windows."
That invokes a whole pile of tool and cultural problems that I won't get
into here. More importantly, Cygwin has the cygwin1.dll GPL licensing
issue. IIUC, this may not be a problem if one is linking only Lisp
code. But if one is also linking C code, as I would be doing, then one
runs afoul of the Cygwin GPL.

Maybe there is some -mno-cygwin way of building stuff. But toolchains
usually don't expect special options and doing things out of the
ordinary tends to break builds. If someone has anecdotes to the
contrary, that they're using GCL in a production capacity on Windows and
have gotten completely free of all GPL restrictions, I'd like to hear
about that.


--
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
- anonymous entrepreneur
.

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