

LispWorks 6.0 Personal Edition is out ... - vmmenon
http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html

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mark_l_watson
I just downloaded the non-commercial version and tried it out. The interface
does not seem to have changed very much over the years, but it has always been
nice.

I bought Linux, Windows, and Mac LispWorks professional licenses about 8 or 9
years ago. One very nice thing about LispWorks is that the utility to make
standalone applications has a "tree shaker" to toss unused code so executables
can be reasonably small (compared to SBCL where a standalone app is about 30
MB minimm or Clozure CL where a standalone app is around 20MB minimum).

I always thought that the tree shaker was the really big win for LispWorks.

Now, when I want to use a Lisp to create small standalone applications I use
Gambit-C Scheme.

BTW, about 10 years ago, I was paid a fee to work on the LispWorks
documentation - but that does not bias my opinion.

~~~
rbanffy
Interesting.

I remember Actor (an Algol-ish syntax flavor of Smalltalk that ran on Windows
3) had a similar thing to trim the image file prior to packing up the runtime.
It removed everything that whatever your app was didn't depend on.

~~~
monk_the_dog
I learned to program with Actor. God I loved programming in that environment.

Why the heck did Symantec buy the whitewater group if they were just going to
kill the damn thing!

~~~
coliveira
This happens all the time. Mainly a company wants the technology and, more
importantly, the people making the technology to apply to their own products.
This is how Sun got its Java hotspot VM, they mainly got people doing this
successful for Smalltalk and other languages.

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whyenot
This looks wonderful, especially the polishing they have been doing to the
IDE. Unfortunately, it's also way outside of my price range.

~~~
gjm11
The Personal Edition isn't -- it's free (but crippled by heapsize and runtime
limitations, and some missing features, so you have an incentive to buy one of
the payware versions).

~~~
stuhacking
It seems to me that the main hooks of Allegro and Lispworks are things like
modern UI bindings, really solid database integration, modelling tools and
stand alone applications... but these are the features excluded from the
trials.

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blue1
...and you have to get the enterprise edition (+2400€) if you want the luxury
of 64-bit.

~~~
mark_l_watson
LispWorks and Franz are both expensive because they offer very good support
and have some very talented staff that need to get paid.

The free SBCL and Clozure CL systems are very good also, and free support from
the developers can be good: one customer project using SBCL 4 years ago hit a
snag running on a 64 GB server and one of the developers sent me a patch in a
few hours. Excellent!

~~~
blue1
I don't doubt the quality of LW, I just doubt that 64bit can be considered an
optional feature these days.

~~~
dfox
And why not? Almost all OSes except unix (and maybe *BSDs) ship almost
completely 32bit userspace these days (Solaris does this for ~15 years). Most
applications does not need more that 2GB of memory, which is largely only
reason to go 64bit. Although on amd64 it's slightly more complex, because of
new registers and instructions, which may overweight increased cache and
memory BW requirements of 64bit code.

~~~
tomjen3
Doesn't 32bit get your 4gb of memory, not just 2.

~~~
stonemetal
Windows at least chops off 2GB for itself so you only have 2GB of the address
space. Other OSes chop off similar chunks.

~~~
pmjordan
You can boot with a special parameter to increase the available user address
space to about 3GB, but that's not terribly well-supported, and you'd only
want to do that on your own servers, not expect customers to do it.

There are also explicit paging APIs which allow you to unmap ranges and later
map them back in, but it's a pain. Usefulness of this is limited anyway, as
physical RAM is limited to around 3GB on the client versions of Windows
(Windows Server supports more via PAE).

A useful trick is to run a 32-bit process on a 64-bit version of Windows, you
can get close to 4GB of address space that way. No need for special boot
flags.

For all of these cases, your executable needs a special "big address space"
flag set.

FWIW, most x86 Linux kernels set aside 3GB for user space.

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gibsonf1
I bought Lispworks Professional several years ago, but now only use SBCL - why
pay when you can have such a powerful and robust system for free.

~~~
loewenskind
Depends on what the paid option offers, of course. In the case of Lispworks it
has (as mentioned elsewhere in the thread) a "tree shaker" that makes building
stand alone apps a _lot_ nicer than SBCL. It also has a superior debugger. I'm
sure there is more but these are what stood out to me when I evaluated it (I
currently use SBCL almost exclusively, but I can see why someone would pay for
Lispworks).

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sgt
I've used one great app that is written with LispWorks. It's called Prime
Trader and is the brain child of Espen Vestre at Netfonds.no

I see they are listing it as one of their success stories:
[http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/netfonds-
primetrade...](http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/netfonds-
primetrader.html)

