Hi all,
Can anyone provide me with some feedback regarding their experience with
Corman Common Lisp?
I've seen plenty of references to Franz and Lispworks, but very few for
Corman. I'm wondering whether this reflects on some basic problem with
Corman that is preventing its adoption by most people.
It seems very reasonably priced in comparison to the other commercial Lisps,
and I've been pretty happy with the trial edition. But the fact that the
last release was in 2003 is a bit scary.
Thanks,
Tony
"TonyW" <··········@email.com> writes:
> Can anyone provide me with some feedback regarding their experience with
> Corman Common Lisp?
I played around with it for a while about a year ago. From memory,
here are things I liked:
- Compiler generates very nice code, as far as I could tell.
- Nice FFI, seems easy to work with the Windows API and DLLs.
- Easy to generate executables and DLLs.
- Source code provided.
And things I disliked:
- Conformance to the CL standard is poor in a few areas, particularly
logical pathname support.
Hmm, that's just one thing. I will say that Roger Corman fixed one
compliance problem that I emailed him about (although I think someone
else might have reported it just before me), and a few other small
problems during the few months that I tracked it.
> I've seen plenty of references to Franz and Lispworks, but very few for
> Corman. I'm wondering whether this reflects on some basic problem with
> Corman that is preventing its adoption by most people.
I think the non-conformance is part of the reason that many freely
available packages don't work well with CormanLisp, although in some
cases patches are available. Add to that the general difficulty of
getting open source packages written for UNIX-like environments to
work on Windows, and the lack of marketing or user activity, and I
think this explains why it's not more popular. Franz's and Lispworks'
products do a fair job of glossing over the platform differerences, I
think, which is to be expected since they support a variety of
platforms.
> It seems very reasonably priced in comparison to the other commercial Lisps,
> and I've been pretty happy with the trial edition. But the fact that the
> last release was in 2003 is a bit scary.
Yes, the deathly quiet on the Web site is spooky. But I agree that the
price is very attractive. If my personal circumstances had been a bit
different, I probably would have bought a license after trying it
out. I may yet do so a few months from now, if there are any signs of
life over there.
I've played with Corman Lisp quite long time. I think it is quite good
for real world things. I thought it would be complete with GUI library
like CAPI in LispWorks. I even write one for internal needs. it is
incomplete, I haven't stimulus to develop it further, 'cause I asked
people about demand for it and received only one or two weak responses.
I think Corman Lisp is very attractive not only by it's license cost,
but because of small footprint.Your application with full compiler
support and all libraries will take 1.5M (unarchived!!!) on your disk
in comparison with about 18M for LispWorks.
Regards
Lisper
From: Edi Weitz
Subject: Re: Experience with Corman Common Lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <u650xjxm4.fsf@agharta.de>
On 12 Feb 2005 12:35:21 -0800, ···········@mail.ru wrote:
> I think Corman Lisp is very attractive not only by it's license
> cost, but because of small footprint.Your application with full
> compiler support and all libraries will take 1.5M (unarchived!!!) on
> your disk
What do you mean by "unarchived?" The Corman Lisp documentation
clearly says that GZIP compression is used by COMPILE-FILE and
SAVE-IMAGE? Don't compare apples to oranges.
(Of course, if the image is stored gzipped than it has to be unpacked
before it can be activated. That will potentially slow down startup
times. There should be an option to disable this feature.)
> in comparison with about 18M for LispWorks.
A full (CAPI) GUI LispWorks EXE like "Regex Coach" is less than 6 MB,
gzipped that boils down to less than 2 MB.
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
>What do you mean by "unarchived?" The Corman Lisp documentation
>clearly says that GZIP compression is used by COMPILE-FILE and
>SAVE-IMAGE? Don't compare apples to oranges.
I mean that if you compress final EXE module with RAR it's size will be
decreased by almost 25%. If you don't believe me, you can try it
yourself.
>A full (CAPI) GUI LispWorks EXE like "Regex Coach" is less than 6 MB,
>gzipped that boils down to less than 2 MB.
I've said "WITH FULL COMPILER SUPPORT". Please, try to deliver 6MB
LispWorks EXE with CAPI, compiler and basic libraries like sockets, mp,
etc. and you will impress me.
By the way, I've found that one can purify Corman Lisp image and get
even smaller footprint.
Regards
Lisper
From: Edi Weitz
Subject: Re: Experience with Corman Common Lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <u3bw1b9ao.fsf@agharta.de>
On 12 Feb 2005 15:22:33 -0800, ···········@mail.ru wrote:
> I mean that if you compress final EXE module with RAR it's size will
> be decreased by almost 25%. If you don't believe me, you can try it
> yourself.
If I pack Regex Coach with rar instead of gzip it also goes down from
about 2 MB to about 1.5 MB. So? Looks like rar compresses better
than gzip with the default settings. What has that to do with Lisp?
> I've said "WITH FULL COMPILER SUPPORT". Please, try to deliver 6MB
> LispWorks EXE with CAPI, compiler and basic libraries like sockets,
> mp, etc. and you will impress me.
You can't deliver the "full compiler" to customers anyway because the
LW license doesn't allow that. Other than that it's apples and
oranges again, because Corman Lisp doesn't even have something like
CAPI or a Lisp-y socket library, it just calls out to the Win32 API
functions.
Don't get me wrong - Corman Lisp is a nice product and I'm a
registered customer. However, even my laptop has 1.5 GB RAM now. I
don't care if my app is 2.8 MB or 1.8 MB, I'd rather pay for a new
Corman Lisp release that is ANSI-compatible enough to load some of the
open source Lisp libs out there. Hell, you can't even use ASDF
without a patch.
> By the way, I've found that one can purify Corman Lisp image and get
> even smaller footprint.
Big deal...
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
Edi Weitz wrote:
> If I pack Regex Coach with rar instead of gzip it also goes down from
> about 2 MB to about 1.5 MB. So? Looks like rar compresses better
> than gzip with the default settings. What has that to do with Lisp?
Again. Your 2MB doesn't include full compiler support and delivery, is
not it ? Corman Lisp EXE include even SAVE-APPLICATION function. You
can have unarchived 1.5M - 2M EXE with all libraries and ability to
generate applications. Try to achieve it with LispWorks.
> > I've said "WITH FULL COMPILER SUPPORT". Please, try to deliver 6MB
> > LispWorks EXE with CAPI, compiler and basic libraries like sockets,
> > mp, etc. and you will impress me.
>
> You can't deliver the "full compiler" to customers anyway because the
> LW license doesn't allow that. Other than that it's apples and
> oranges again, because Corman Lisp doesn't even have something like
> CAPI or a Lisp-y socket library, it just calls out to the Win32 API
> functions.
It doesn't matter (about licesing), because you physically can't do it.
Corman Lisp has modules for pretty high level sockets interface. And
you mean LispWorks doesn't call Win32 API functions ????
> Don't get me wrong - Corman Lisp is a nice product and I'm a
> registered customer. However, even my laptop has 1.5 GB RAM now. I
> don't care if my app is 2.8 MB or 1.8 MB, I'd rather pay for a new
> Corman Lisp release that is ANSI-compatible enough to load some of
the
> open source Lisp libs out there. Hell, you can't even use ASDF
> without a patch.
If you have to deliver small APP with much functionality these
arguments are nothing. But you are right in general, of course. But I
feel bad when C++ applications with same functionality are ten times
smaller, 'cause I need articulate why my EXE module is so big. ;-(
> > By the way, I've found that one can purify Corman Lisp image and
get
> > even smaller footprint.
>
> Big deal...
Yes. Big deal, 'cause Corman Lisp doesn't have purificator in box. ;-)
Regards
Lisper
From: Edi Weitz
Subject: Re: Experience with Corman Common Lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <uzmy6bu2g.fsf@agharta.de>
On 14 Feb 2005 14:06:18 -0800, ···········@mail.ru wrote:
> And you mean LispWorks doesn't call Win32 API functions ????
Of course it does. But using it is several orders of magnitude more
convenient than calling them directly.
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
From: Edi Weitz
Subject: Re: Experience with Corman Common Lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <u1xbljxjb.fsf@agharta.de>
On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 22:07:31 +0100, Edi Weitz <········@agharta.de> wrote:
> What do you mean by "unarchived?" The Corman Lisp documentation
> clearly says that GZIP compression is used by COMPILE-FILE and
> SAVE-IMAGE?
------------^
That was supposed to be a dot, not a question mark.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")