Brandon Werner

Martin Simmons of LispWorks confirmed today on the LispWorks mailing list that an Intel native version of LispWorks for the Macintosh platform will be available by June 2006.

There will be an Intel native Mac version of LispWorks 5.0, which is due in Q2
this year…We can probably fix problems with LispWorks for Macintosh 4.4 running under
Rosetta as chargeable support work. Please ask about that on lisp-support.

Many people have commented that almost all versions of Lisp (both free and commercial) have problems running on the Intel platform of Mac OSX do to signifigant problems with using Lisp through the Rosetta software program that translates PPC instructions to Intel for compatibility with applications that do not have a universal binary or Intel native product available.

Lisp is a language that ties very deeply to the kernel and the hardware of a computer, and it is not surprising that Rosetta is causing problems with Lisp developers. Among reports of problems are hanging and very slow compile and start-up times for Lisp IDEs and applications.

An un-answered question is the support for PPC and in particular Mac OSX on PPC in the future. Because Lisp is processor dependent, a universal binary (fat binary) solution is not possible, and Lisp vendors will have to actively support versions for both PPC and Intel on Mac OSX.

Given the wide use of Mac OSX in the acedemic and biomedical industries, this move was expected but previously un-released. Allegro, the other big commercial Lisp vendor, has not disclosed any plans on when it will go Intel native.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Lisp, OSX, Operating Systems, Software Languages, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.