My initial training in Computer Science used the Scheme programming language. I also did some undergrad research using Common Lisp on the Texas Instruments Lisp Machines. I’m not a whiny, bitter Lisp weenie, but I’m definitely sympathetic with the cause. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much of a chance to really use Lisp at all in recent years.
Just for grins on the new laptop I decided to kick the tires on a wide variety of Lisp implementations: CLISP, SBCL, Clozure CL, PLT Scheme, and scsh. While I haven’t pushed any of them too hard, I have to say I’m extremely impressed in how fast these guys run.
Lisp implementations out of the box performed pretty decently on mid-90’s stock hardware. Moore’s law dragged the Intel platform past the special purpose Lisp Machine architectures. Meanwhile, Common Lisp and Scheme have been pretty stable since then and despite their kitchen sink nature, regarding the former, and hyper advanced features, corresponding to the latter, technology’s march has blown past them. What used to be a large Lisp memory image is peanuts these days.
Next up, digging into how well these various Lisps interface to modern graphic toolkits and what kind of graphics performance do you actually get.