Hi.
A few years back, I bought MCL 4.3, and then didn't use it for a long while.
A couple of month ago, I downloaded both the latest MCL 5.1 "free demo" as
well as LispWorks PE 4.4.6 and I've been using LispWorks exclusively
since then.
I'm now considering forking the bucks :) for the "Professional" version of
either (but not both!) of those.
I have been enticed, *at the surface level* by LW, which is much closer
to a "real Mac app" than MCL. Yet I'm not such an expert to asses their
relative strength "under the hood". LW is about 30% more expensive than
MCL, but that's not a determining factor. Since I've become quite serious
about Lips these days :) I am wondering if anyone with both MCL and LW
experience would want to share their impressions.
Many Thanks
--
JFB ()
On 2005-12-17 08:52:46 -0500, verec <·····@mac.com> said:
> Hi.
>
> A few years back, I bought MCL 4.3, and then didn't use it for a long while.
> A couple of month ago, I downloaded both the latest MCL 5.1 "free demo" as
> well as LispWorks PE 4.4.6 and I've been using LispWorks exclusively
> since then.
>
> I'm now considering forking the bucks :) for the "Professional" version of
> either (but not both!) of those.
>
> I have been enticed, *at the surface level* by LW, which is much closer
> to a "real Mac app" than MCL. Yet I'm not such an expert to asses their
> relative strength "under the hood". LW is about 30% more expensive than
> MCL, but that's not a determining factor. Since I've become quite serious
> about Lips these days :) I am wondering if anyone with both MCL and LW
> experience would want to share their impressions.
>
> Many Thanks
Wow, this is a flamewar waiting to happen. I'll just note some things
you might want to consider.
Lispworks is a Cocoa app. You can use CAPI (Lispworks proprietary
cross-platform GUI library) or you can build UI components in Interface
Builder and then define Cocoa classes from Lispworks to use these nib
files (nib = NextStep Interface Builder). Lispworks is meant to be used
with Cocoa.
MCL is a Carbon app with excellent interfaces to Carbon. MCL has an
ephemeral GC which allows for pause-free OpenGL work. MCL has an add-on
floating point compiler which brings it up to par with Lispworks in
this area (out of the box MCL is significantly slower with floating
point and multi-dimensional array code). MCL is meant to be used with
Carbon.
Apple is moving to Intel chips. Lispworks has shipping lisp IDEs on two
Intel platforms (Windows and Linux), so they've already done two intel
compilers (how much of this will be usable for intel Macs I cannot
say). MCL has no intel compiler that I'm aware of, though Gary Byers
the author and maintainer of OpenMCL and the original developer of the
MCL compiler has clearly put considerable thought into what it would
take to do one since Apple made their announcement earlier this year.
My opinion now (that is, not just some facts about these two products):
Apple is pushing developers quite heavily to use Cocoa. Several recent
new technologes are acessible directly from Cocoa but not directly from
Carbon (Core Data, Core Image, Dashboard Widget Plug-ins). This
suggests to me that being able to do Cocoa is more valuable on the Mac
platform than being able to do Carbon and have to wrap all the Cocoa
stuff (c callable wrapper functions). Having already ported their
Windows intel compiler/IDE to one *nix platform, I'm guessing that
Lispworks will be sooner to market with an intel native Mac OS X lisp
than MCL will. These things suggest to me that Lispworks is a better
use of your money.
On 2005-12-18 02:30:34 +0000, Raffael Cavallaro
<················@pas-d'espam-s'il-vous-plait-mac.com> said:
[...]
Summary: LispWorks is Cocoa, MCL is Carbon
Carbon not "as first class as" Cocoa
LispWorks already has intel compilers
MCL doesn't but seem to be considering it
MCL needs "adds-on" for floating-point (performance)
On 2005-12-18 03:54:49 +0000, Alain Picard <············@memetrics.com> said:
[...]
Summary: LispWorks has a cross-platform offering to boot,
MCL doesn't.
So far: LW: 2 MCL: 0
I'll wait a bit more to see whether the MCL score takes off,
Many thanks for your input.
--
JFB ()
From: Edi Weitz
Subject: Re: Comments on MCL vs LispWorks for OS X ?
Date:
Message-ID: <uhd96gld1.fsf@agharta.de>
On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 13:23:55 +0000, verec <·····@mac.com> wrote:
> I'll wait a bit more to see whether the MCL score takes off
These recent threads
<http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/fe598c3715c9b092/d7250986a549112e>
<http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/2e276117925dcbe8/217aacea076820c3>
and probably others have a lot of information that might be
interesting to you.
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
From: Alain Picard
Subject: Re: Comments on MCL vs LispWorks for OS X ?
Date:
Message-ID: <87zmmzcb5i.fsf@memetrics.com>
verec <·····@mac.com> writes:
> MCL, but that's not a determining factor. Since I've become quite serious
> about Lips these days :) I am wondering if anyone with both MCL and LW
> experience would want to share their impressions.
Well, this may be of no use to you whatsoever, but do keep
in mind this: Lispworks has windows and linux (and several unices)
implementations. So if you're developing something to turn into
a commercial standalone, somewhere down the track, it may be more
suitable simply because of that fact.
If you're 100% dedicated to the Mac, then, I have no opinion,
never having seen MCL. But on Linux and Windows, LW is quite nice.
--ap.