time of evaluation of defstruct, deftype, etc.

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

    This problem cannot be solved with multiple address spaces, unless you have a
    very complicated mechanism for sharing objects between address spaces, 

I don't understand this.  What has to be shared in a complicated way?


    Stepping back a level, the main issue for the Common Lisp community is do
    we want to say that this is an issue which each implementation should solve
    for itself, in order to have a compiler that can be considered "high quality",
    or is this something that should be made a standard part of the language,
    with a portable interface?  Obviously one alternative is "better" for the
    users and the other alternative is less work for the language standardization
    effort.

As I said in my answer to Weinreb, the way you want to go about solving
this problem depends a lot on the kind of system you're running in.  In
Accent, for example, there are multiple processes and it is very quick
and easy to create a clone process due to the copy-on-write memory
management.  We should probably standardize those things that we have to
in order to have sets of portable source files that can be compiled and
run anywhere, and leave to the local culture those things that are not
required for this.

-- Scott