24mb heap limit ACL Trial 5.01
Pierre R. Mai
> I would like to learn Common Lisp using Allegro Common Lisp Trial 5.01
> (Freebsd edition). I plan to read through three recommended textbooks on
> Common Lisp: Ansi Common Lisp and On Lisp, both by Paul Graham, and
> Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Peter Norvig.
>
> So far everything is going rather well. But I can't help but wonder what
> impact the 24mb heap limit that ACL 5.01 trial imposes will have on my
> further studying. Out of curiosity, is it possible to complete these three
I didn't know that ACL 5.01 Trial Edition on Unix had a heap limit
nowadays. Are you sure about this?
But anyway, 24 MB should be plenty to complete all the exercises and
run all the programs in the books mentioned, IMHO.
> books without having memory difficulties using ACL 5.01 Trial? My Freebsd
> distribution also contains two Lisp implementations - CMUCL and CLISP; to
> what degree are these implementations compliant with ANSI Common LISP and
> support CLOS (more specifically, can I complete these three books and have
> the CMUCL or CLISP implementations understand everything)?
You could also use CMUCL and CLISP to complete the books. In general
I'd recommend you familiarize yourself with all the implementations
you can get your hands on.
Regs, Pierre.
--
Pierre Mai <pm...@acm.org> PGP and GPG keys at your nearest Keyserver
"One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-
bashing." [Microsoft memo, see http://www.opensource.org/halloween1.html]
Christopher R. Barry
> "vinodh das" <kac...@pd.jaring.my> writes:
>
> > I would like to learn Common Lisp using Allegro Common Lisp Trial 5.01
> > (Freebsd edition). I plan to read through three recommended textbooks on
> > Common Lisp: Ansi Common Lisp and On Lisp, both by Paul Graham, and
> > Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Peter Norvig.
> >
> > So far everything is going rather well. But I can't help but wonder what
> > impact the 24mb heap limit that ACL 5.01 trial imposes will have on my
> > further studying. Out of curiosity, is it possible to complete these three
>
> I didn't know that ACL 5.01 Trial Edition on Unix had a heap limit
> nowadays. Are you sure about this?
He's quite correct. In the root directory of the 5.0.1 distribution in
readme.htm there is
The Trial Edition of Allegro CL has the following limitations:
The Lisp heap is limited to roughly 24MB.
The program expires on 11/1/2000.
The function excl:dumplisp is not available.
The function excl:build-lisp-image is not available.
The function excl:generate-application is not available.
The 5.0 distribution has no 24MB heap limit, and I can remember saving
CL-HTTP *.dxl files from what seems like nearly a year ago, but I
can't remember the incantation. (I remember doing a workaround
involving the profiler and prof.fasl that Erik told me about or
something.)
I remember Erik some months ago mentioning that Franz got burned on
the Allegro CL 5.0 Linux Trial Edition. It was effectively the
Enterprise Edition minus application delivery and enterprise
connectivity (SQL, Corba, etc.). It even had :ALLEGRO-CL-ENTERPRISE in
*FEATURES*. If you used sockets for connectivity, there was
effectively nothing you could not achieve with it.
So it's probably for the better that there is a 24MB heap limit (which
is more than generous enough anyways.) A time limit would have been
really annoying, so I'm glad they didn't include one. I imagine at
some point I'll _really_ miss image saving if for example I ever want
to use CL-HTTP with it again or third-party freeware like Garnet or
Mark Kantrowitz's DEFSYSTEM, because 30-second to several-minute load
times get really tiring after you've done them a zillion times. (But
with no time-limit on the image and Linux's 2.2.x swapping performance
hopefully I'll just be able to load them and then not FUBAR the
package system or do other things that require an image reboot.)
Christopher
Erik Naggum
| I imagine at some point I'll _really_ miss image saving if for example I
| ever want to use CL-HTTP with it again or third-party freeware like
| Garnet or Mark Kantrowitz's DEFSYSTEM, because 30-second to
| several-minute load times get really tiring after you've done them a
| zillion times.
a couple tips are in order. first, newspace is effectively twice as
large as the active memory, so make sure to keep it small. you can
adjust the GC parameters to this end, and also call SYS:RESIZE-AREAS.
second, the amount of newspace can grow fast when loading, so investigate
the function EXCL::LOAD-APPLICATION, which tenures objects much faster
than the normal behavior.
#:Erik