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As a datapoint Quake is quite old. When it was released it used software rendering on a Pentium2. While is nice that everything from the ground up is written in lisp it sounds as if you are only achieving the performance of a P2 on modern hardware. What is the performance gap between Mezzano and an OS/application written in C/C++?

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Folks are missing the point with performance. The Mezzano compiler + translating LLVM into Lisp wont be very efficient. That’s not the point. It’s crazy that a game like that runs on a non-Windows non-UNIX machine that is written from the ground up in Common Lisp, by way of compiling an application into a bunch of Lisp source code first.

I think you forget just how old Quake is. I remember playing it on a 486DX 66Mhz, a P2 would have been total over kill for that game.

P2 sounds about right for Quake2

Are you thinking Quake III Rocket Arena?

*Quake III Arena

Rocket Arena is/was a mod

Both Quake 1 and Quake 2 ran fine on my Pentium MMX (and i guess regular Pentium since they didn't use the MMX stuff) using the software rasterizer and Quake 3 also ran fine on my Pentium 2 with a GeForce 2.

I sadly tried to run Quake on my 486DX 33, and it was not up to the task =(

I built it (circa 1996) on HP PA-RISC workstations, like HP-715's. There was no assembly code for those, just portable C. The frame rate wasn't great, but it played.

The reason it is slow is not because it is written is Lisp but because of how it is implemented, primarily because it is a hobby project. Graphics are rendered on the CPU for example.

https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano/blob/master/gui/blit-x86-...

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