From crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!news Tue Aug 3 21:09:49 EDT 1993 Article: 10736 of comp.lang.lisp Xref: crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:10736 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Path: crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!news From: sef@sef-pmax.slisp.cs.cmu.edu Subject: Future of CMU Common Lisp Message-ID: Sender: news@cs.cmu.edu (Usenet News System) Nntp-Posting-Host: sef-pmax.slisp.cs.cmu.edu Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 04:58:53 GMT Lines: 53 Some recent developments will have a significant impact on the future of CMU Common Lisp. The CMU CL development has been funded for many years by DARPA. Technically, it was bundled into CMU's contract for development of Mach and related software. That contract ended last April, and the people at DARPA indicated very little enthusiasm for supporting any further CMU CL development beyond this point. Whatever the future role of Common Lisp may be in the software world, it is no longer viewed as a hot area of research. So, as of last April, the CMU Common Lisp project no longer exists, as such. However, the group is still together and we are starting work on an exciting new project, also funded by (D)ARPA. This project is called "Igor", and the goal is to develop an innovative new software development environment, based on a high-quality implementation of the new Dylan language. I'll say more about the Igor project in a later message. Because a lot of people depend on our code, and because we will be using CMU CL as a cross-development vehicle for Igor, we don't plan to drop all support for it. However, this is now a side-show for us, so support will not be at the same level as before. We will soon be releasing the 17-series core, which will fix a number of bugs and bring the released version more or less up to date with all our latest changes and fixes. We will continue to keep CMU CL running for another couple of years, at least, and we will port it to some additional machines and operating systems that we need for our Igor work. But we probably will not be adding any major new features that we do not need for our Igor work. In addition, we may be reluctant to fix obscure Common Lisp bugs that, in our opinion, are not hurting real users. We expect that when the smoke clears on the X3J13 standard, there will be lots of little details to fix up in CMU CL, and some of those fixes may get a very low priority. Our CMU CL sources will continue to be freely available, so users who become impatient with the pace of our bug-fixing may be able to fix things themselves. If such fixes are sent back to us, and if we believe they will not cause other problems, we will incorporate them. We are sorry if these changes hurt our existing user base, but we are excited about our new Dylan-based project. In any case, continuing CMU CL as before was not an option without ARPA or industrial support, and the current plan is preferable to dropping CMU CL support completely. -- Scott =========================================================================== Scott E. Fahlman Internet: sef+@cs.cmu.edu Senior Research Scientist Phone: 412 268-2575 School of Computer Science Fax: 412 681-5739 Carnegie Mellon University Latitude: 40:26:33 N 5000 Forbes Avenue Longitude: 79:56:48 W Pittsburgh, PA 15213 ===========================================================================