It had a 'gigantic' memory footprint of 4 MB - the all-in-C version only used 1 MB. The Lisp version was also slower and they didn't use features like GC...
Yes, that's what I remembered, they started out using LISP.
> Our feeling is that the use of LISP has been a terrible mistake for several reasons.
"Terrible mistake" is pretty unambiguous language.
Only for the optimizer and the inference engine.
The authors also had no prior experience developing an application in a hybrid of C and Lisp.
> "Terrible mistake" is pretty unambiguous language.
4MB memory footprint was a terrible mistake at that time.
They tried going all LISP at first, and failed. Was it them, or was it LISP?
Writing a database in a performant way isn't something for a Lisp newbie.
"By the time Version 1 was operational, it contained about 17000 lines of LISP and about 63000 lines of C".
Version 1 was written in a mix of C and Lisp.
That's also not surprising, since that would have been a common approach for some technical reasons. But it's a bit difficult to do - again, especially as a newbie.
> Was it them, or was it LISP?
Their lack of experience, their approach, the LISP implementation they were using, the hardware constraints (4 MB footprint was not acceptable to them), ... A conservative approach using a lower-level systems programming language like C was a good choice at that time and they were much more successful with that approach.
There were/are a bunch of databases written in Lisp and even in a mix of C and Lisp: Statice (Symbolics), Zeitgeist (TI), Orion/Itasca, AllegroStore (Franz), ... But they were written by Lisp experts.