My company develops and maintains an open source Common Lisp implementation. Over the last several months, we've been porting its compiler and runtime to ARM Linux (with most native development and testing done on an Efika MX smarttop.) That port should be available as part of the next stable release; it's of approximately beta quality (it can compile itself - where that involves compiling > 300,000 lines of lisp source code - and passes a fairly extensive test suite, but still suffers from intermittent stability problems.)

The (roughly) annual International Lisp Conference was held last week in Reno, NV. Partly to try to judge interest in the ARM port and partly to try to stimulate that interest, we decided to raffle off an ARM netbook at the conference, and Genesi was kind enough to donate an Efika MX Smartbook. This year's conference was very poorly attended (only about 25% of last year's attendence), but more than half of the attendees registered for the drawing. I think that most people that we spoke to were pleasantly surprised to see Common Lisp running on low-power mobile devices and some people seemed to be very enthusiastic about the possibilities.

I brought my own smartbook to the conference and used it to give demos, check email, browse the web ... the typical things one does with a laptop at a conference. In general, it performed quite well, and I believe it's true that the only times that I needed to plug it in during the day (during moderate use) were when I was using it to charge my phone via USB.

I'd guess that Common Lisp might seem to be a little ... off the beaten path ... for many people here, but hopefully this information's of interest.

Gary, this information is definitely of interest! I'm a lisp newbie myself - I had not touched much lisp since university, but last year a friend pitched to me clozure and I was amazed how modern, lightweight and powerful CL actually is today! I've tinkered with clozure on two PPC platforms - OSX@G4 and linux@G2 (yep, that's efikaPPC : ), and I have nothing but good to say about the native code generation and the quality of the system libraries - two things of utter importance to me. The whole package just radiates swiftness and elegance.

If you get clozure on ARMv7 to the level it is currently on PPC, you'll have at least one happy 'customer' here : ) Even though C++ has been paying the bills all these years, I do believe an old dog can learn new tricks, and hey, why not help EfikaMX get its impromptu one day!

@Gary

We will continue to support your efforts.

Keep things moving ahead. Thank you.

R&B :)

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