Re: [Axiom-developer] CCL maintenance.

[Stephen Wilson]

Hello Waldek,

Waldek Hebisch <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> > *,
> > 
> > Are any of the current maintainers working with CCL at all?  Is
> > maintaining compatability with this Lisp of importance to anyone?
> > 
> 
> I checked that CCL from Nag Cdrom builds OK.  ATM I do not intend
> to do any serious work on CCL, but I intend to check if current
> Axiom is still compatible with CCL.  IMHO we should choose one
> of possible directions:
> 
> 1) Make sure that CCL really works for building Axiom
> 2) Drop CCL support completly

It was in thinking about these two options exactly which promoted my
email.

> Current state, that is having a lot of code to support CCL, but
> no testing of this code gives us the combined disadvantages of
> the possibilities above: we are spending time on CCL support code,
> but CCL does not work out of the box.
> 
> >From my point of view main advantage of CCL is that it is quite
> portable.  Also, it looks that CCL can be cross-compiled with
> basically the same effort as for native build.  There is also
> licencing issue: IIUC CCL licence is pretty liberal when somebody
> wants to deliver closed source program on top of CCL, but is
> GPL incompatible.  

I am not a fan of the license myself.  I doubt Codemist Ltd would let
it go under three-clause BSD.  Im not interested in improving software
under a license like this.

> Big disadvantage is lack of Ansi compatibility.

Yes, a big disadvantage indeed.  In addition, if CCL were to be
supported by axiom, it would be us who would need to maintain and
improve it.  I personally have little interest in enhancing CCL into a
full Common Lisp, there are plenty of other lisps out there which do
that for me already.

> 
> Clisp is also quite portable, so it is possible that CCL offers
> no advantages over clisp (but this requires more analysis).

Clisp is portable, and has most ANSI issues ironed out.  I dont have
the need myself to analyze CCL to figure Clisp has all the advantages.

At this time, I am all for dropping CLL support.


Thanks,
Steve