Date: Tue, 22 Feb 1994 10:11 PST
From: Steven W. Mitchell <·····@alumni.caltech.edu>
Is anyone out there using a commercial common lisp on the Silicon Graphics
workstations? In particular, has anyone had success with the FFI (foreign
function interface) of their lisp? We're trying to port an automated planner
from Suns using Allegro CL onto some SGI Indigo's using Allegro CL, and are
having problems with the FFI.
Check the rev of your chips. rev 2.2 chips require a special version of
allegro, and special compilation of all your c code.
There were also some operating system problems, related to memory
management on all r4000 chips, with earlier versions of allegro (allegro
4.1 is ok)
SGI keeps tweaking the binary format, and allegro's use of "nm" "ld" and
similar utilities from the unix environment is fragile and likely to
break. For example, we have to use the version of ld that franz used to
build allegro, rather than the version supplied by SGI with our indigos.
If memory serves, allegro also has some problems replacing old versions
of c code with newly loaded versions, which can be massively confusing
when debugging.
Check /tmp. If it fills up, foreign function loading stops working. Allegro
tends to leave files lying around there, unless you exit cleanly.
Notwithstanding all of the above, it does eventually work.