testing a new Clisp Windows installer

[Wolfgang D. <wol...@da...>]

Hi all,
I would also be interested in testing a new Clisp Windows (pre)release.

I am a member of the Maxima-Team (Maxima is a CAS written in Common
Lisp) and my main contribution is, that I create (crosscompiled)
Windows-Installers for Maxima (for the 'crosscompiliation' for Lisp
based programs I use Wine, which works well).

I did start with Clisp as supported Lisp, now I also support SBCL. Clisp
is slower, but - in my opinon - more hassle-free, it is still the
default Lisp in my installers.

So I am *certainly* interested in testing a new Clisp release for
Windows - if it does work with my crosscompilation procedure. (If
possible, both a 32 and a 64 bit version). [For the creation of my
installer just a ZIP-File is easy to use, that was one of the reasons, I
did start with Clisp (the other reason was, that it worked well with Wine)].


Some more questions:
Clisp is much slower than other Lisp implementations. On the Maxima
website http://maxima.sourceforge.net/lisp.html
there are some notes about the reasons (I am not sure, if they are correct):

"Clisp is compiled to bytecodes, so Maxima running on Clisp is
substantially slower than on Lisps compiled to machine instructions.
Clisp computes floating-point operations in software, so floating-point
operations in Clisp are much slower than in Lisp implementations that
use hardware instructions for floating-point operations. On the other
hand, Clisp makes use of the GMP library for arbitrary-precision integer
computations."

(a) Is "computes floating-point operations in software" correct?
Nowadays? Can one disable that? I assume most processors can do it in
hardware now.
(b) "Clisp makes use of the GMP library" - how can one enable it? I
compiled Clisp now from Daniels sourcecode, but libgmp seems not be used
(checked using 'ldd'). And there is no configure-option '--use-libgmp'
or something similar.

Best regards, Wolfgang