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Date:Mon Aug 21 17:13:28 1999 
Subject:Re: Is Lisp Dead on Linux? (NO!) 
From:Raymond Toy 
Volume-ID:990821.03 

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com> writes:

    Craig> it is the excellent documentation.  CMUCL regretably has
    Craig> very little implmentation documentation, and so it's a
    Craig> nightmare trying to learn how to rebuild, modify and
    Craig> maintain it, or port it.

As someone who has rebuilt and modified CMUCL, I think it would still
be a nightmare even with documentation. I understand even the main
developers have a difficult time rebuilding when something major
changes.  Porting would be extremely hard whether you had
documentation or not.

I think the same could be said for gcc.[1]  How much documentation is
there to help you modify, maintain, or port it?

However, as Peter Van Eynde pointed out a while ago, there are lots
of things you could do to make CMUCL better that don't require
difficult compilations.  Things like improving bignum arithmetic,
making the compiler smarter, etc.


Ray


Footnotes: 
[1]  I have not looked at gcc, so I might be wrong.