This is a quick summary of experience I've had with selecting a brand
of Lisp for use on an SGI Indigo workstation. The application is an
intelligent drawing and painting program, originally written in C,
now ported to Lisp. The user had been working on a Texas Instruments
Lisp machine, quite satisfactorily, but that machine is no longer
supported. The department decided to upgrade to an all-SGI laboratory
for graphics, so we had to select another Lisp for the SGIs.
We investigated both the Allegro and Lucid Lisp. Both seemed to perform
according to package directions. However, I found the Lucid Lisp to be
both easier to install, and faster in its performance. The code it
generated, especially when optimized for speed, was noticeably faster
than that produced by Allegro. The program in question is over 10,000lines
of lisp, driving a mechanical drawing machine, so execution time is key.
The user chose the CLX interface to
Lucid as a graphics environment, with emacs as editor. We found that
the documentation provided by Lucid was easier to follow than Allegro's.
Support for the CLX end of things was minimal with both companies.
If you want to use CLX, the hooks are there, but you have
to get your own documentation off the net. Not much of a problem.
You also have to get your own questions answered somewhere else.
That hasn't proved much of a problem either really. There's alot of
CLX expertise available net-wise.
I must say that the folks at Allegro were always very helpful, and
the Allegro Lisp may better serve the needs of users in other situations
than ours. But these are the facts as I saw them.
Susan Fichera
UC San Diego CRCA