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0 pointsdartos2y ago0 comments

Was it? I thought even in the lisp machine days, lisp was kind of garbage collected, so that was always the bottleneck.

I remember a quote that was like “Lisp programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing” in reference to that.

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lispm2y ago

> “Lisp programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing”

Obviously the developers of Lisp Machine operating systems could not ignore the cost of the operations. Especially since they developed ambitious software (an operating system and its application) on relatively slow machines (a Symbolics 3600 was as fast as a 1 MIPS DEC VAX 11/780).

pjmlp2y ago

Yes, and?

GC was a kernel service, and there were low level primitives, including Assembly level Lisp forms.

Parenthesis all the way down to microcode.

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