From: David Bakhash
Subject: LCL vs. LW under UNIX
Date: 
Message-ID: <cxjk8s93o6s.fsf@acs5.bu.edu>
Hi,

I havn't been in the Lisp community long enough to know the history of
LispWorks and LCL.  I heard something like "Harlequin bought Lucid Lisp and
made it Liquid, or something like that.  I don't know.  Anyway, I'd just like
the history, and (if anyone knows) differences between LispWorks and Liquid
under UNIX, from the perspective of past users.

thanks,
dave

From: Chuck Fry
Subject: Re: LCL vs. LW under UNIX
Date: 
Message-ID: <7m57da$n69$1@shell5.ba.best.com>
In article <···············@acs5.bu.edu>, David Bakhash  <·····@bu.edu> wrote:
>I havn't been in the Lisp community long enough to know the history of
>LispWorks and LCL.  I heard something like "Harlequin bought Lucid Lisp and
>made it Liquid, or something like that.  I don't know.  Anyway, I'd just like
>the history, and (if anyone knows) differences between LispWorks and Liquid
>under UNIX, from the perspective of past users.

As I understand it (this is 3rd hand from friends who worked there),
Lucid's ill-fated venture into the C++ development environment business
gobbled up a substantial amount of money and failed to produce the
desired returns, so the venture capitalists closed the company.  The
Lisp business had been funding the C++ effort, but the VCs didn't see
the kinds of returns in the Lisp business that they wanted.

Initially Franz made an announcement that they would be buying LCL, but
after several months of uncertainty, Harlequin acquired it instead.

At the request of a Lucid salesperson, we had evaluated LCL against
Allegro CL shortly before all this occurred.  Our shop was then, and
continues to be, primarily an Allegro shop.  Code produced by the Lucid
compiler performed quite a bit better on the then-new SPARCstation 10s
we had; but we already had a substantial investment in Allegro, which
was adequate for our needs, so we stuck with it.

We also had a couple of users of LispWorks at the time.  They were
staunch advocates of the LispWorks development environment, calling it
the next best thing to the Symbolics Lisp machine environment.

I don't have any experience with Lucid (Liquid) after Harlequin acquired
it, so I will leave that topic to someone who does.

 -- Chuck, again not speaking for NASA Ames Research Center, Caelum
Research, or Recom Technologies
-- 
	    Chuck Fry -- Jack of all trades, master of none
 ······@chucko.com (text only please)  ········@home.com (MIME enabled)
Lisp bigot, mountain biker, car nut, sometime guitarist and photographer
The addresses above are real.  All spammers will be reported to their ISPs.
From: Nick Levine
Subject: Re: LCL vs. LW under UNIX
Date: 
Message-ID: <7ma8ss$3su$1@epos.tesco.net>
David Bakhash wrote ...

>I havn't been in the Lisp community long enough to know the history of
>LispWorks and LCL.  I heard something like "Harlequin bought Lucid Lisp and
>made it Liquid, or something like that.  I don't know.  Anyway, I'd just
like
>the history, and (if anyone knows) differences between LispWorks and Liquid
>under UNIX, from the perspective of past users.


The history is that Harlequin did indeed acquire Lucid's product (and
customer base) in late '94. LCL was then at various versions, depending on
platform, ranging from around 4.0.x to 4.2. Over the next two-and-a-bit
years, considerable effort went into moving all the ports to the same
release level, supporting current OS releases, and porting Harlequin's CAPI
and lisp IDE ("Common LispWorks") onto LCL. In the months before beta of LCL
5, legal reasons required Harlequin to drop the name "Lucid" and thus
"Liquid CL" was born. Current general release is 5.0.x on all platforms; the
beta of 5.1 was in the pipeline at the time that Harlequin and I parted
company.

If you can get your hands on current (by which I mean: patched up-to-date)
versions of LW 4.1 and LCL 5.1, you will find that they are the same from
the FLI / CAPI upwards. The underlying lisp implementations are, as ever,
separate though over the years some code merging has taken place. In
particular: wholly separate compilers and GC. Many differences at the
"language extensions" level - a good guide to the uninitiated is that
symbols in the LW package should be the "same" in both lisps, whereas
symbols in the HCL and LCL packages will only be found in LW(W) / LCL
respectively. Which brings me to the major difference: LW is available on
Windows platforms and LCL is not.

Beyond that: well, I heard many comments, in both "directions" of you get my
meaning, over the years about relative efficiencies of various elements of
the two implementations. I never saw any really convincing evidence to back
these up though. You mileage will vary.

- nick (whose opinions are not currently those of any employer)