[developers] SBCL port

[Stephan Oepen]

howdy,

> But I expect a port would not be too difficult to achieve for either
> of these systems. Stephan, what do you think?

[incr tsdb()] makes fairly central use of foreign functions, which are 
non-standard.  also, the [incr tsdb()] GUI depends on threads, which in
SBCL are just barely available (in a way different from the traditional
MP package), and only for Linux on x86 and AMD64 currently.  i have no
current plans to port [incr tsdb()] to other Lisps, and personally i am
not too keen on getting other developers involved in that right now.  i
would want to review patches to [incr tsdb()] code so as to make sure i
can maintain its overall design.  these days i am afraid i have no time
for such activity.

the LOGON MT architecture is an extension to [incr tsdb()], i.e it has
inherited the same constraints on cross-platform portability.  however,
we are about to release a complete run-time edition of LOGON, such that 
people will be able to get full functionality without their own license 
for Allegro CL.

more high-level, SBCL does look like a Lisp going the right direction.
but before it makes sense for us to make the coordinated effort towards
supporting the breadth of DELPH-IN software on a new Lisp, we should be
sure of our minimum requirements.  the following come to my mind:

  (1) stable, efficient, actively maintained ANSI CL implementation
  (2) UniCode strings, including full external format support
  (3) cross-platform availability
  (4) multi-processing, preferably with Lisp control of scheduler
  (5) foreign function interface
  (6) high-level OS interface: run-shell-command(), sockets, et al.

SBCL appears to have all of the above but (4).  i know CMU-CL used to
include the traditional MP package, but i have no idea about the other
desiderata there.

                                                          best  -  oe

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