[Cryptography] Use Linux for its security

[Ron Garret]

On Oct 1, 2016, at 9:46 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

> At 07:43 AM 10/1/2016, Ron Garret wrote:
>> On Sep 30, 2016, at 1:24 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> This also *guarantees* that Lisp can never compete
>>> with some other languages in the efficiency of high volume I/O.
>> 
>> But if you really care about reading arrays efficiently you probably want to use a binary representation with a header that tells you the size and use read-sequence.  That can be as fast as C.
>> 
>> (Surely you knew all this?  Why are you of all people spreading FUD about Lisp???)
> 
> My problem is that Common Lisp deserved a lot of the criticisms aimed at it -- particularly its (in)efficiency on "stock" (aka C-language-oriented) hardware.

Yes.  Deserved.  Past-tense.  SBCL has been competitive with C for a long, long time now.  Again, surely you knew this?

Also, safety isn’t free.  You can pay for it with silicon or you can pay for it with time.  Or you can go without, which is a perfectly defensible position.  Everyone needs to choose their own risk posture.  But *if* you want safety, I think CL has a very good value proposition and it should be considered more seriously than it generally is.  Could CL be improved?  Certainly.  Would it be worth the effort?  That is far from clear.

rg