OpenMCL Presentation
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Rainer Joswig (on
his blog) pointed to a
recent (August 2005) presentation by Gary Byers on
OpenMCL at the
ACL2
seminar at the University of Texas. I enjoy using OpenMCL on Mac
OSX (the two CL's that I currently use the most on Mac OS X are
OpenMCL and SBCL) and found reading Gary's presentation very
informative and interesting.
Some of
the tidbits that are in the presentation:
- Background:
- Commercial MCL was first released in 1987; ran on 1MB MacPlus (68K), rich IDE, GUI; fast compilation
- Gary Byers created a port of MCL for NASA/JPL that (in 2001) he was able to get released as an open source project (subsequently, this became OpenMCL)
- An estimated 200-300 active users (mainly individuals rather than institutions)
- Future plans:
- Apple's x86 announcement
- Handling of large objects in GC/EGC, handling of very large address spaces (especially on 64-bit platforms)
- Better (e.g., "some") lifetime analysis in the compiler (reduce floating-point consing)
- Metering/performance tools
- Other funded work
- Gary indicated that he would like to start making OpenMCL releases every 2-3 months (as opposed to the current, somewhat lengthy release process)
- Technology summmaries of OpenMCL's:
- Garbage Collector
- thread imlementation
- compiler
- environment and debugging
- performance tools
- build process
If you're interested in OpenMCL (or CL's for Mac OS X in general), you might like to read this post too.
