Implementation Of Multiprocessing Spur Lisp

This paper describes an implementation of the multiprocessing features of SPUR Lisp. The implementation consists of a set of C runtime routines that is being integrated into the Lisp system. It was developed on Sun workstation under the Sprite operating system, and will ported to the SPUR multiprocessor workstations when the hardware becomes available. In this report, we describe the internal structure of the system, design tradeoffs, and present preliminary performance figures. We hope this paper will be useful to other implementors of these multiprocessing features.