Show HN: A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF

https://savannah.nongnu.org/p/alisp

by andreamonaco • 1 year ago

96 38 1 year ago

savannah.nongnu.org

Implementation of the standard is still not complete, but breakpoints and stepping work quite well! It also has some support for watchpoints, that no implementation has.

Now it ships with ASDF and is capable of loading systems!

Let me know if you like it. Support on Patreon or Liberapay is much appreciated

WalterGR3• 1 year ago

a debugger with stepping, a feature that most free CL implementations lack.

I think most free CL implementations have a stepper. Which ones do not?

andreamonaco8• 1 year ago

I tried stepping in various free implementations, but I couldn't really follow the source forms and execute them one by one. Also, I couldn't find much information online. Maybe your experience is different?

WalterGR3• 1 year ago

I haven’t used CL recently so I can’t speak from experience. But it looks like:

CMU CL, SBCL, and LispWorks have steppers.

Clozure does not. (Edit: an answer on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37754935/what-are-effici... suggests it does...)

As I understand it, those are the big 4.

Clisp, ABCL, and Allegro also appear to have steppers.

Always cool to see a new implementation, though!

eadmund• 1 year ago

Congratulations! Always good to see another Lisp in the world.

Have you thought about writing up your experience?

andreamonaco8• 1 year ago

Thanks! Maybe I could do that, if I see that people are interested

andreamonaco8• 1 year ago

Also, my Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/andreamonaco) has behind-the-scenes posts, some even in the free tier

neonscribe2• 1 year ago

Do you have a goal in mind for this project?

andreamonaco8• 1 year ago

Ideally I'd reach ANSI compliance, first with a bytecode compiler and then with a full one

neonscribe2• 1 year ago

Is there some important shortcoming of all the existing Common Lisp implementations that you would like to correct?

danilor• 1 year ago

Hey I'm curious as why you chose nongnu to host your project instead of github/gitlab! I don't know much about it, hence my curiosity ;)

badmonster2• 1 year ago

kazinator• 1 year ago

I hosted the TXR git on nongnu first, starting at around late 2009 or early 2010 maybe?

I abandoned that when I discovered there's no control. I seem to recall having to wait like over a week for someone to enable non-fast-forward pushes. Overly strict and understaffed. I opted for self hosting.

I kept the project web page there, though.

andreamonaco8• 1 year ago

I don't like sites with heavy Javascript, especially if it's non-free. (Though recently I started using Github for a different project.)

Savannah is very basic, perhaps too much, but it's okay for my project.

volemo• 1 year ago

Tbh, this is the first time I see nongnu.org used for something other than Emacs packages (I know that’s on me), so much so that I even thought this was a solution to substitute Emacs Lisp with Common Lisp. :O

badmonster2• 1 year ago

Does alisp plan to eventually support full compilation to native code, or will it mainly stay an interpreter with limited compilation?

andreamonaco8• 1 year ago

Yeah, the goal is first bytecode compilation and then full

valorzard2• 1 year ago

I would be excited to use but since it’s using GPLv3 I can’t actually use it for a lot of projects I’d want to make ;-; Is it possible to relicense to LGPL or MPL instead?

kstrauser3• 1 year ago

In general, people who license something as GPLv3 probably consider that a feature, not a bug.

I mentioned here recently that I released a personal project under the GPLv3. The very first issue someone filed in GitHub was to ask me to relicense it as something more business friendly. I don't think I've been so offended by an issue before. If I'm writing something for fun, I could not possibly be less interested in helping else someone monetize my work. They can play by Free Software rules, or they can write their own version for themselves and license it however they want. I don't owe them the freedom to make it un-Free.

The fact that this is hosted on a FSF-managed service indicates the author likely sees it similarly.

fc417fc802• 1 year ago

I generally agree but it's worth noting that languages are a bit different. Obviously there are GPL'd compilers but those often make an explicit carveout for things like the runtime and standard library. Meanwhile in the Lisp world my impression is that most (but certainly not all) implementations are permissively licensed in part due to concerns that shipping an image file is essentially shipping the entire language implementation verbatim.

valorzard2• 1 year ago

Yeah that makes sense, if it’s it’s just for fun

-__---____-ZXyw• 1 year ago

Hard to believe this comment could be serious, but nonetheless, for the impartial observers, there is a healthy ecosystem of Common Lisp implementations, from "permissive" open source all the way to (expensive) commercial, proprietary ones.

https://common-lisp.net/implementations

I think a full-featured GPLv3 implementation would be very cool, personally.

whartung• 1 year ago

At what point does a CL implementation need to be before it can start hoovering up the available library code from other implementations (license permitting).

How many LOOP macros does the community need, particularly when bootstrapping an implementation, as an example.

Similarly with, arguably 70-80% of the runtime. The CL spec is dominated by the large library which, ideally, should be mostly portable CL, at least I would think.

klibertp3• 1 year ago

You're not the first one to think so: https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL

I'm unsure how complete it is, but it seems to cover much of the standard.

v9v• 1 year ago

Here's a recently-written summary of the different libraries in SICL (including each library's purpose and status) http://metamodular.com/SICL-related-libraries/sicl-related-l...

g2963• 1 year ago

a hypothetical portable layer exists, but it starts diverging once deployed, because of cleanups, refactoring, or implementation specific hacks.

LOOP is a great example, because all loop is just MIT LOOP version 829, originally cleaned up by burke. but nobody can resist deploying their personal architectural touch, so while the basic framework of loop remains identical across impelementations, there's superficial refactoring done by pretty much everyone. if you take SBCL and franz lisp as state of the art in free software and commercial respectivaly, they have equally solid improvements on original loop, that actually produce incompatible behavior in underspecified corners of spec. respective developer communities are very defensive about their incompatible behavior being the correct behavior of course. beach's SICL from sibling comment is the xkcd joke about standards "20 standards? we need a new standard the unifies them all! -- now we have 21 standards"

LOOP in this case is a very simple example, but for example CLOS was originally implemented on top of PCL, Portable CommonLoops, an interlisp system, that was massaged into being compliant CLOS over years. for example sbcl uses a ship of theseus PCL, but franz lisp did from scratch rewrite. the hypothetical portability of that layer is significantly trickier than LOOP since clos is is deeply tied to the type system, and the boundary between some hypothetical base system common lisp and its clos layer becomes complicated during system bootstrapping. but that's not all! of course clos has to be deeply tied to the compiler, the type system, all kinds of things, to provide optimizations. discovering the appropriate slicing boundary is difficult to say the least.

CleverLikeAnOx• 1 year ago

What is ASDF?

alexjplant• 1 year ago

No idea why you're being downvoted for asking a simple question about an acronym. From Wikipedia [1]:

ASDF (Another System Definition Facility) is a package format and a build tool for Common Lisp libraries. It is analogous to tools such as Make and Ant.

Contemporary developers using more mainstream languages are likely more familiar with asdf [2], the "Multiple Runtime Version Manager".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_System_Definition_Faci...

[2] https://asdf-vm.com/

mikedelago• 1 year ago

ASDF - another system definition facility - is the de facto standard build system for common lisp.

https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/

In common lisp, you don't need a build system at all; you can `(load "file.lisp")` everything and it should generally just work. But of course, build systems are useful tools, so nonetheless ASDF exists and it's nice enough to the degree that nobody has built a better and more widespread common lisp build system.

Some good trivial examples are in the lisp cookbook:

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/systems.html

nexo-v1• 1 year ago

Out of curiosity, what influenced your decision to prioritize stepping and watchpoints early? Was it driven more by debugging your own compiler code, or anticipating end-user needs

andreamonaco8• 1 year ago

I'd say the latter, since I felt the need for debugging tools similar to other languages like C. Watchpoints for example are entirely non-existent in current implementations, as far as I know

Show HN: A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF

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