Language support companies (Was: Java GOOD -- Fire BAD)

[Laurent GUERBY <address@hidden>]

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 17:00, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> "Joe Marshall" <jrm@ccs.neu.edu> writes:
> > I have seen this happen time and time again:
> >    1.  Prototype is developed in Lisp
> >    2.  Attempt is made to port to a less capable platform:
> >         these days it's Java or C++, but in the 80's it was
> >         C and Ada (remember Ada?)
> >     3. The result is a general fiasco.
> 
> I think the way to end that sort of thing is by showing more
> benchmarks proving modern Lisp compilers are as good for their purpose
> as C etc. -- then no one will think of the prototype as a prototype
> anymore.

Talking about this, one thing I would need to feel
more secure is paying multi-platform quality support : I mean you ship
a report and you get back either a working compiler
or a usable workaround in under a few days on all your platforms
(contractual). When the project I currently work on, we choosed Ada 95
as language (eh eh :) and GNAT as support provider (www.gnat.com) on our
platforms (IRIX/MIPS, Solaris/SPARC, Linux/IA32, Win32/IA32,
AIX/PowerPC).

Free software has always a nice feel for long term support, you always
have the option of hiring an expert to continue maintenance if
something goes wrong with your support company (or you have the
potential to have multiple support companies to choose from).

What about this kind of platform support for LISP (or other nice
languages)? Any list of companies by language?

In our case, we also need numerical computation performance
so benchmarks in the area would be nice too.

Laurent