SBCL: New in Version 2.2.1

http://www.sbcl.org/all-news.html?2.2.1#2.2.1

by susam • 4 years ago

107 76 4 years ago

vmsp• 4 years ago

Is there anyone here using CL in production? If so, why -- compared to more mainstream solutions -- and how's your experience been?

fiddlerwoaroof2• 4 years ago

These people are: https://www.itasoftware.com

smegsicle• 4 years ago

No reason not to, unless you can't trust your developers with high-power footgun features like.. multiple dispatch ??

rjsw3• 4 years ago

I am, it is easier to write than C or C++ and faster than Python or Ruby.

mmmm2• 4 years ago

Grammarly, at least as of November, 2020: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...

diskzero8• 4 years ago

Yes. I have deployed mobile applications using native UI (SwiftUI, etc.) with all the shared logic in Lisp. To me, this was a better alternative than the usual C/C++ shared logic approach.

My current application is a music hardware device that is mostly Lisp. As to why, this could be a lengthy post, and I am sure I have made one elsewhere on HN. It is a very good language, has many of the features that are being re-discovered and implemented in other languages, has an interactive model of development (REPL driven) that I find very productive and I can deploy an application across multiple platforms with little to no modifications.

I do pay for LispWorks and it is more than worth it. I make a living developing applications and devices that use Lisp and the cost is covered by a fraction of a percentage of sales.

Some people may try to use SBCL, CCL or other free implementations. I just don't have the time or risk tolerance to be dependent upon the lack of predictability for bug fixes or modifications needed to run on new architectures. The M1 architecture has been a big problem for some of these Lisps. CCL has no timeline for adoption and some commercial products are suffering as a result. GNU Scheme will probably never be able to run on the M1. LispWorks stays current and will fix reported bugs rapidly.

moonchild3• 4 years ago

M1 architecture has been a big problem for some of these Lisps. CCL has no timeline for adoption and some commercial products are suffering as a result. GNU Scheme will probably never be able to run on the M1. LispWorks stays current and will fix reported bugs rapidly

SBCL supports the M1; lispworks and allegro still do not.

jpe903• 4 years ago

Do you use emacs the lispworks editor, or something else for coding?

solarmist3• 4 years ago

Any tips for getting started doing mobile with Lisp? Or general moving from standard development environments to lisp?

I've been interested for a long time, but never really came across examples of established developers branching our so I don't really know where to look to get started. I'm already an emacs user too, so it bothered me that way too.

ssfrr• 4 years ago

Is your inner audio processing loop implemented in CL? What kind of real-time guarantees does it provide?

solarmist3• 4 years ago

My current application is a music hardware device that is mostly Lisp. As to why, this could be a lengthy post, and I am sure I have made one elsewhere on HN.

I was curious and stalked your profile, but I didn't come up with anything that summarized your reasoning on why you use Lisp beyond this brief statement. Perhaps you were remembering the discussion around "Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28366292).

If you get a chance I'd love to read your take on in it. There are so few people doing active development in lisp its hard to let go of a chance like this.

wglb2• 4 years ago

cost is covered by a fraction of a percentage of sales

Does their licensing cost relate to your sales?

I remember inquiring some time back, and to buy the commercial version, you had to, among other things, agree to their right to audit your books, which to me seemed draconian.

varjag3• 4 years ago

We do, in the context of a distributed embedded system.

It's great way to achieve high development velocity without compromises on runtime efficiency. I'm substantially proficient in C (we've had a bunch of systems done in it too) and there is no question we'd have missed our budget/time/features target had we chose it instead.

That said we don't use SBCL but LispWorks for delivery and CCL for development.

patrec2• 4 years ago

Interesting, I'd have assumed that LispWorks would be a much nicer development environment than CCL. Are you trying to save license fees, or do you actually find CCL nicer to work with?

juanre• 4 years ago

I do, the star mapping sofware at the core of my company is Common Lisp run by sbcl. I use it because it is fast, reliable, and a pleasure to develop with. Actually, that is true, but the actual reason I use it is that many many years ago I read PG's "On Lisp", and was blown away by it. So I had to find a project to try Lisp out. It ended up being my livelihood.

medo-bear• 4 years ago

this is awesome! do a showhn for valentines, or similar in lisp reddit :)

vindarel• 4 years ago

See: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

(to everyone answering: is your company listed there?? Thanks in advance)

See also this recent interview: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/

(and I also do for a DB-management script and a simple webapp)

reikonomusha2• 4 years ago

Yes, have been using it in production and hiring Lisp programmers for over 5 years.

wglb2• 4 years ago

I've used SBCL in production (75k lines of Lisp) and it worked very nicely on Linux.

Koshkin• 4 years ago

SBCL is one of the two most useful Common Lisp implementations (the other one being Embeddable Common Lisp). I wish I could permanently move to the Common Lisp / emacs universe. Unfortunately, I am stuck in this one, called "the Real World."

pjmlp4• 4 years ago

I consider Allegro and Lisp Works more useful, as they are closer to the original Lisp Machine/Interlisp-D development experience.

lispm5• 4 years ago

Load McCLIM into SBCL. See https://github.com/McCLIM/McCLIM or https://mcclim.common-lisp.dev

It's available also via Quicklisp.

exdsq4• 4 years ago

Is Lisp Works compliant CL, such that any CL written in their IDE will work with SBCL too?

math-dev4• 4 years ago

Lisp Works is way better than SBCL ;)

Its just that open source communities have the most vocal proponents, but the closed source users tend to keep quiet and just get to work. Generalizing to some degree of course

And SBCL comes from CMUCL, most of the best parts of it are from that stellar implementation

lispm5• 4 years ago

There are quite a bit improvements in SBCL over CMUCL. I like it.

reikonomusha2• 4 years ago

I've been a professional user of SBCL and LW. They both have merits.

LW has better package delivery and a stellar GUI tool. LW is otherwise slow and requires non-portable APIs to get reasonable performance for some kinds of low level code.

SBCL is cheaper, way way faster (in almost every dimension), more portable, better integrated with most OS environments, and provides better static diagnostics. It suffers from having a meh garbage collector and meh delivery mechanisms.

walterbell• 4 years ago

What does the Common Lisp community think about the adoption of Clojure and ClojureScript by "knowledge graph" companies like Roam Research and clones like Obsidian (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28894481) and Athens (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793)?

May 2020, https://athensresearch.ghost.io/why-you-should-learn-clojure...

Clojure code is incredibly dense. If I have a file with 30 lines of code, it might as well be 1000 lines of java. I’m not exaggerating. The code does a whole lot in a few words and once you’re comfortable with Clojure, man you can whip out a web service really fast ... You will never want to program without a REPL again ... Clojure isn’t just function-oriented in its syntax; it can be object-oriented, and stack-oriented, and array-oriented, and so on–and mix all of these styles freely, in a controlled way. If you don’t like the way the language fits a certain problem, you can write a macro which defines a new language, specifically for that subproblem.

Is Clojure considered a net positive for bringing more funding and developers into the family of Lisp dialects? Do Clojure developers graduate to CL?

ravi-delia3• 4 years ago

I love Common Lisp, but frankly the purists are wrong on this. Clojure is a damn sight more of a lisp than any other even remotely common language. My preference now leans CL, but Clojure is a joy in its own right, with some of the nicest little touches I've seen in a language.

rscho• 4 years ago

Why "more of a lisp"? I guess it depends on your personal definition of what a lisp is. For example, I'm much more interested in Racket because my interest is computer science.

bnjms• 4 years ago

You will never want to program without a REPL again

I’m not a programmer. What does this mean in terms of Python? Does one write code in the repl then export it to a file to Polish when done?

Kototama• 4 years ago

It's like the prisoners of Plato's cave. One could describe it to you but it's nothing like trying it. I would suggest you look for some videos or blog explaining it, or take a a week-end to try. The term REPL is here deceptive. You can load the whole compiler and the whole program in memory in a server accepting code changes and interact with them iteratively and have transparent incremental compilation when editing the code.

azeirah• 4 years ago

Kind of, a Python REPL is nothing more than a live Python environment. You type some Python code and you immediately see the result. The main idea behind a REPL is to speed up the feedback loop of write code -> execute code -> verify results -> modify code -> repeat.

The simplest REPL you're probably familiar with is a separate window where you can execute some Python code which you can then copy paste into your editor where you can polish it. This is helpful, but a REPL (even the Python REPL) can do more.

For example a nice IDE for python or lisp lets you execute selected pieces of code with a single keypress. You immediately know whether it works, and you can try out your snippet with different inputs to quickly test it etc.

You'll often make a modification or two after checking your code in a REPL, and good IDEs will let you replace the original snippet with your modified snippet with one or two key presses.

REPLs tend to be a little bit nicer if they're well integrated into your program, for instance you can load parts of your program, or start a REPL with a breakpoint in the middle of a program to debug your code from within a REPL. Again, intelligent IDE integration makes this really cool!

In the case of many Lisps, REPLs have even deeper functionality. You get features like automatically being thrown into a REPL when an error happens, so you can rewrite the code and pretend the error never happened and run it with the updated version. This is even possible in live code! (I believe some lisp code running in a space device at some point was updated from within a REPL in this way? While it was in space!)

I believe there is even more to it than that, but I've never gone deeper than this.

pnathan• 4 years ago

I've worked at two different Clojure companies now.

My take is that yes, Clojure is strictly better than, say, Python. It is strictly worse than Common Lisp. A lot of stupid BS just goes away when you're not papering over an underlying runtime. Yet, the Common Lisp community has struggled with what I'll genteely call "ergonomics of modern development"; i.e, the language contortions to do some boring normal things, particularly around hashmaps, are a PITA. Clojure addresses that nicely. However, if a serious startup went into Common Lisp, those things would be addressed internally in a few months (hopefully they'd release the library).

The angle where Clojure really wins is access to JVM libraries. Just, no contest.

Clojure as a hiring strategy is strategically problematic. It's niche, a lot of people won't know it, and some really smart people will do some gnarly hacks for your company starting out. The implication is that later on, you have to unwind the hacks, new people have to go through a deconfusion period, and the smart people will move on leaving you with gnarly code to untangle. I do not expect this to be different for Common Lisp companies.

Would I build a team on Common Lisp? Yes, but I would not plan it in such a fashion that I would expect the team to get large, or for the entire company to have to interact with their codebase. I'd apply similar calculus to Clojure, I just don't think its as good as CL.

If I really needed the JVM libraries, I'd be doing the project in Scala.

Too, if I really needed a strong reliable software pipeline, I'd be doing the project in a strongly typed non-dynamic language: Scala, Rust would be my preferred goto languages.

diamondap• 4 years ago

I worked at Hotelicopter, which was a hotel meta-search engine written in Ruby on Rails. We were bought out by the six major hotel chains in the US and re-branded as Roomkey.com. To get us started, they agreed to push a lot of traffic at us. We knew from load testing that it would be very difficult, with our practically non-existent ops team, to scale Rails to handle 1000x our current load.

We knew we had to rewrite the system in a more scalable language, and we had to be live on a fixed date. This was late 2010, early 2011. Our CTO evaluated a number of languages and chose Clojure. A team of five or so devs was able to write the entire system in a few months and launch without problems. I don't think that would have been possible in a non-lisp language.

The Clojure learning curve was steep, especially since stack traces for anonymous functions in Clojure 1.1 often began with "nil pointer exception, no source file, line 0."

Once our dev team "got" Clojure, we were hooked. The verbosity of other languages started to look appalling. Clojure let us iterate quickly without sacrificing performance, which was suddenly a big issue.

Writing Lisp code permanently changed the way I think, and the way I code in other languages. I strongly prefer composing short, deterministic functions, which are testable and easy to reason about.

Roomkey became a victim of the pandemic, when hotel bookings declined sharply.

I'm just now starting to pick up Common Lisp, and it's a joy: the simplicity and consistency of the language, the REPL, the emacs integration. I also like that it compiles to native code. That's good for performance and for deployment, since it doesn't require the target machine to have a JVM.

alexott2• 4 years ago

it would be really useful to add release dates to this page...

rjsw3• 4 years ago

Today is the last Sunday of the first month of the year.

stassats• 4 years ago

Ok, I added the dates.

alexott2• 4 years ago

Thank you

SBCL: New in Version 2.2.1

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