Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available
by sedachv on Sunday November 07, 2010 @08:47PM
(#1881060)
Saying that Genera was portable because Open Genera was there is like saying that MS DOS is portable because there's QEMU.
Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available
by lispm on Monday November 08, 2010 @02:13AM
(#1881716)
Or like any other language implementation with a language-oriented virtual machine: Java/JVM, CLISP, SQUEAK, ...
Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available
by sedachv on Monday November 08, 2010 @01:06PM
(#1883297)
But Open Genera isn't a language-oriented VM, it's an Ivory emulator. There's a huge difference.
Re:Symbolics Genera - The Best Software Environment Available
by lispm on Monday November 08, 2010 @02:05PM
(#1883525)
The Ivory is a language oriented processor - not a computer. It's a CPU, a chip. Where is the difference? Open Genera also does not emulate an Ivory-based computer, but the processor mostly. It emulates the instruction set.
Symbolics' problem was not that their software was not portable. Open Genera is a VM and ran on DEC Alpha, it would have been possible to port it to other 64bit machines.
But the business went away. The thing was too costly. It was also not just a Lisp implementation, but a portable OS. As an OS it simply did too much: own networking, own window system, ...
The reason why Franz is still around and Symbolics' is not, is not a question of portability - it is because Franz' Lisp is just a Lisp implementation and concentrates on that - where Genera / Open Genera is an OS, which simply does too much. Why run a TCP stack in Lisp on a machine which already has a TCP stack? Why run a window system on a machine which already has one? Plus the rest of the machine does not benefit from that. If the other software could use the Lisp TCP stack, but it can't.