Peter Seibel peter@javamonkey.com writes:
[ACL 5.0]
I assume you mean that's the oldest ACL you're testing with, not the only one?
Yesterday I fired up our ACL backend for the first time ever, I think. I haven't been testing it at all.
Each backend really needs some people to use it and care for it in order for it to work well. A lot of problems will only show up during real usage, and I doubt most people can do serious programming with more than 1-2 backends at a time. I only ever use the CMUCL and SBCL backends except when trying to reproduce a reported bug.
That said, the most important part is finding the bugs. Once they're found it's not so hard to fire up the right Lisp and work on a fix. (But currently 5.0 is the only version of ACL that I'm able to run on my computer - 6.2 doesn't link - so we'll have to wait for a copy of 7.0beta to look at Edi's bug reports.)
Also now that we're headed towards a release we should do some more systematic testing of the various backends. But I think heavy-duty real usage is the most important thing, so I'm really glad that you and Edi will be hammering away on ACL :-)
Caveat: It almost looks like Helmut is actually using every Lisp :-)
-Luke