Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 10:57:32 +0100 (MET) From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Interest in large collection of Lisp/Scheme implementations? Message-ID: <199611190957.KAA29674@knight.cons.org>
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I have been maintaining almost every free Lisp and Scheme system on my NetBSD/i386 machine for several years now. I'm moving my work to FreeBSD and I wonder if there is interest that I take the extra effort and make proper FreeBSD ports/packages of all these. If you have an opinion, could you please drop me a note on the following questions? Thanks! - Is there some interest to have such a wide collection of Lisp-related packages on FreeBSD or do you think is a rather pointless or would you fear FreeBSD could be seen as some kind of "new Lisp machine"? - Can I rely on the commiters that updates are being brought in the main tree quite fast? This community is quite sensitive and I need to react fast if I made a suboptimal port. If you think the OpenBSD discussion was a flame war, you haven't heard talking FooScheme people talking about BarScheme's implementation. I noticed jmacd@FreeBSD.ORG has some ports of Scheme. If you read this, would you please contact me? I'm talking about more than just compiling these packages. I plan to make Common Lisp/Scheme libraries availiable for as many implementations as possible. This is a very time-consuming thing to do starting from individual sources (there's no ./configure in Scheme :-). And using shared libraries instead of static ones where it makes sense (the Boehm GC and some regular depression packages are used quite often). A proper setup of elisp packages so that control to several implementations is granted from emacs is needed. I also plan to see how one can use FreeBSD's VM system to speed up some implementations and promote the results. I think we could make FreeBSD a nice platform for fans of dynamic languages. Just a few commands and get the full range. And FreeBSD's VM system will make it the best platform for people with too few memory anyway, but I fear I could be the only one interested in all this. So please speak up if you want it (Alternativly, I could just burn my /usr/local on a CD and send that around). To list a few numbers: There are about 20 standalone implementations of Lisp-like languages (counting only interesting ones). There are about half a dozend implementations that can be used as an extension language library for C or C++ programs. I have no idea how many (Lisp) libraries could be worth making a package from, but 10 at least. Some elisp packages and C libraries are needed for support. Thanks for feedback (posistive or negative) Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (batched, preferred for large mails) Tel.: (daytime) +4940 41478712 (sometimes hacker's daytime :-) Tel.: (private) +4940 5221829 Fax.: (private) +4940 5228536 Paper: (private) Waldstrasse 200, 22846 Norderstedt, Germany
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