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

[Leo B. <Leo...@um...>]

It would be helpful if Camm could comment on the points made thus far.

----

Developers who don't want to spend time working around gcl's
deficiencies shouldn't. I believe that several have already stated that
they do not test their work on gcl builds.

OTOH, I would like to have a minimally functional maxima+gcl. If that
means we add a cautionary bannerline about unsupported features, let's
do it.

The problem, as I have experienced repeatedly, is that gcl
will finish big computations while others barf (sbcl), take toooo
long (clisp) or some combination thereof.

Leo

On Mon, Oct 17 2022, 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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