SS-Lisp — run Lisp in your browser (IDE + compiler + VM)

http://mihai.bazon.net/blog/ss-lisp-run-lisp-in-your-browser

by p4bl0 • 14 years ago

64 10 14 years ago

mihai.bazon.net

p4bl0• 14 years ago

See also the screencast[1] linked in the article, it shows that the compiler and VM are rather good given the fluidity of the demo, and it's also a good demo of the experience of Lisp REPL-driven programming.

[1] http://vimeo.com/42070553

diminish• 14 years ago

Something which was always in my mind, thanks. Ymacs seems to be interesting too.

jlongster3• 14 years ago

Ymacs (the editor he is using) is really impressive, but it really needs a license:

https://github.com/mishoo/ymacs/

*Edit: Nevermind, the license is at the top of every file instead of a LICENSE file. Glad to see it's BSD.

Also, I'm disappointed that he doesn't show any actual benchmarks and the skeptical side of me thinks that it would be too slow for production development. Still, very impressive, I've been wondering recently if it would be possible to get a VM fast enough for the web, and this looks like a good starting point.

EDIT: I'm also really surprised that he didn't show a whole lot of debugging workflows in the screencast, since you could easily do things like stepping with a VM.

mishoo2• 14 years ago

Speed is acceptable in Chrome, but the gap between V8 and other JS engines is stellar. :-\ So I'm afraid it won't be too useful for production use.

There's no debugger yet. It would be fairly easy to step through VM instructions, but to step through source code expressions looks quite complicated. First thing I'd like to do is to have a stack frame inspector.

What's unfortunate is that even the smallest new feature can have a quite dramatic impact on speed...

jlongster3• 14 years ago

If you track the expressions when compiling, you could embed them somewhere with information about which bytecode they refer to, and all you have to do when stepping is lookup the source expression. This kind of thing does tend to touch every part of the compiler though.

I work for Mozilla, but not specifically for Firefox, but I am interested to hear which parts were much slower for Firefox. If you have any jsperf or other test cases as examples, I'd love to see them and I can report back to the Firefox guys about it.

This looks extremely impressive though, I'm glad I don't have do all this work now to see how well a VM can perform!

EDIT: I was viewing your examples in Firefox, and they seem to perform rather well. Not incredibly speedy, but they seem close to the speed shown in the video.

xyzzyz• 14 years ago

He should make Ymacs available as a browser userscript, so that one can globally replace usual textarea with it.

pjmlp• 14 years ago

Cool as a geek demo, but I prefer my native tools.

SS-Lisp — run Lisp in your browser (IDE + compiler + VM)

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