Re: [Maxima-discuss] Trying to accommodate GCL is keeping us from making progress

[Raymond T. <toy...@gm...>]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 11:06 AM Robert Smith <ro...@st...>
wrote:

>
> Pros for keeping GCL:
>
> - Supporting GCL means increased portability of Maxima
>
> - - Some operating systems have GCL accessible due to it being a GNU
> project.
>
> - - GCL is an older Lisp and therefore works on older systems.
>

Because gcl has so many quirks, I don't think it actually helps portability.

>
>
> - Since Maxima was co-developed with GCL, Maxima may be faster in some
> smaller arenas (symbol-plists IIRC?) than other Lisps. (This knowledge may
> be out of date.)
>

It's been a while, but gcl was the fastest (or second fastest) when running
the testsuite.  I don't know if that's still true; but it's speed
definitely depended on having all the functions proclaimed during
compilation.  We have (or used to?) that set up correctly.

>
> - GCL requires a C compiler.
>

But so does ecl, which we support.  But that's not really a problem for
maxima; if you can run gcl (or ecl), you already have what's needed to run
it.

>
> GCL at this point is a liability to the Maxima team, Maxima contributors,
> and ultimately the Maxima project.
>
> Cheers,
>
> RS
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 09:46, Robert Dodier <rob...@gm...>
> wrote:
>
> GCL has several deficiencies, and continuing to accommodate them is
> keeping us from implementing various things, aside from being a time
> sink.
>
> Things I can remember at the moment, there may be others. Also, this
> is aside from dealing with GCL-specific bugs.
>
> * wildcards in DIRECTORY -- GCL doesn't behave as expected
> * compiling pregexp.lisp -- most recent released version can't
> compile pregexp.lisp; most recent unreleased version doesn't build on
> my system
> * ASDF, UIOP, Quicklisp -- doesn't work with GCL
> * CFFI -- doesn't work with GCL
> * Unicode characters -- GCL doesn't know about that
>
> Someone's going to say, well, nobody needs any of that stuff. I guess
> that's true, but that's not very convincing, right? "We don't need
> that" is an all-purpose argument which brings everything to a dead
> halt if one really believes it.
>
> I'd like to get to a place where we can talk about the merits of this
> feature or that feature, without the conversation immediately getting
> derailed by "well, GCL doesn't support that."
>
> I know we've had similar discussions over the years. This week we have
> someone volunteering to work on Maxima, so that's what's new.
>
> At this point I'd like to discontinue support for GCL in Maxima, and
> discourage package maintainers from trying to use it, since that will
> inevitably lead to users reporting non-working features as bugs. Can I
> get anybody on board with that?
>
> FWIW
>
> Robert
>
>
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-- 
Ray