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SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]

62 points by pabs3 ago | 32 comments

vindarel |next [-]

Previously:

SBCL (16 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140657 (107 comments)

Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41530783 (81 comments)

An exploration of SBCL internals https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40115083 (106 comments)

Arena Allocation in SBCL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38052564 (32 comments)

SBCL (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36544573 (167 comments)

Parallel garbage collection for SBCL [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37296153 (45 comments)

SBCL 2.3.5 released https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107154 (31 comments)

Using SBCL Common Lisp as a Dynamic Library (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31054796 (67 comments)

etc

praptak |next |previous [-]

SBCL seems pretty actively developed. A proposal for coroutines implementation appeared recently and AFAIK it is being actively discussed and improved upon.

TurboHaskal |root |parent |next [-]

And arena support, and a parallel GC... there's always something exciting and promising coming up.

The proprietary implementations are also quite good.

pjmlp |root |parent [-]

To note that you will find arena like stuff on old Lisps, like those from Xerox, TI and Genera.

geospeck |root |parent |previous [-]

Do you have a link to the proposal and the discussion? I am quite interested to see the implementation details. Thanks!

praptak |root |parent |next [-]

It's on the devel mailing list: https://sourceforge.net/p/sbcl/mailman/sbcl-devel/thread/CAF...

Antibabelic |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Here's an SBCL coroutines talk at the European Lisp Symposium from 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2nVKfYJykw

praptak |root |parent [-]

Yeah, so I believe that this proposal kind of petered out at proof of concept phase but the author of the one being discussed references it.

atgreen |root |parent |previous [-]

I'm the author. https://atgreen.github.io/repl-yell/posts/sbcl-fibers/

ivanb |root |parent [-]

This is fantastic! Godspeed.

larsbrinkhoff |next |previous [-]

Jonathan Blow: "It’s about a compiler written in Python FFS."

phtrivier |root |parent [-]

Missing the joke here. The pdf if about a Common Lisp compiler, written in Common Lisp, C, and assembly for good measure.

massysett |root |parent |next [-]

I don’t get it either. The CMUCL compiler is named Python, no relation to the prominent language. Not sure that’s what this was about though.

pfdietz |root |parent [-]

That was his confusion.

bmacho |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Seems some rando posted something factually false on twitter, got corrected and apologized.

krishSingaria |previous [-]

I am learning scheme(dr racket), which is i think derived from lisp, what is this actually used for and do people build anything with lisp???

pjmlp |root |parent |next [-]

Yes, people do build anything with Lisp, that is why there are at least two commercial Common Lisp systems around, LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp.

Google Flights is an acquisition of a company using Lisp, ITA Software, they even have a Lisp guide.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml

In Portugal, Siscog used to be a Lisp shop, no idea nowadays.

Then you have the Clojure based companies, where Datomic and Nubank are two well known ones, even if not a proper Lisp, still belongs to the same linage.

vindarel |root |parent [-]

Yes, SISCOG is still kicking. From last year's European Lisp Symposium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMVZLo1Ub7M

pjmlp |root |parent [-]

Obrigado. Thanks.

I was aware of the company when I was still living in Lisbon, a few decades ago.

atgreen |root |parent |next |previous [-]

This very website that you are using right now, Hacker News, runs on sbcl.

mark_l_watson |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Lisp languages are niche, but frequently used as seen in the great projects mentioned in this thread. Since 1982, I have been employed about 20% of my time using mostly Common Lisp and for a few years Clojure. Racket is a great language and system for learning and having fun, so, have fun!

vindarel |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Examples with screenshots: http://lisp-screenshots.org/

Some companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ (Routific, Google's ITA Software, SISCOG running resource planning in transportation, trading, big data analysis, cloud-to-cloud services, open-source tools (pgloader, re-written from Python), games (Kandria, on Steam and GOG, runs on the Switch), music composition software and apps…

More success stories: https://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/

I myself run web-apps and scripts for clients. Didn't ditch Django yet but working on that.

Keyframe |root |parent |next |previous [-]

*I am learning scheme(dr racket), which is i think derived from lisp*

it _is_ Lisp. Namely lisp-1, vs what one would consider lisp like common lisp would be lisp-2. Difference mostly being that in lisp-1 everything's in single namespace, whereas lisp-2 has more. So, in scheme you cannot have a function and a variable have the same name. In common lisp you can. Other diffs being (syntactically) passing functions and executing them. There are other things, of course, but not that big of a deal. Scheme is simpler and suitable for teaching / getting into lispen. I'd argue it might also be a rather well-equipped DSL.

bitwize |root |parent [-]

"Emacsen" I can understand by analogy with plural forms like "oxen". "Lispen" is new to me.

tmountain |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Often as a DSL (domain specific language) for extending applications at runtime and/or configuration. I wouldn't start a "serious" project in Lisp today; meaning, a project with investment behind it, but Lisp can be a real joy to work with, and I've used Clojure for countless hobby projects. Clojure, in particular, has lots of deployments around the tech industry, and it's the foundation of the Jepsen DB test suite, Datomic (an immutable DB), and Metabase, as a few examples. Walmart has a non-trivial amount of Clojure running in prod as well.

mkreis |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Scheme is mostly used for teaching, but there are many production applications out there written in Lisp (Emacs for example). Also I'd like to mention Clojure, which is "lispy" and used by big cooperations.

mapcars |root |parent |previous [-]

I used a few different lisps for pet projects and honestly today for me the biggest problem of lisps is the typing. ADTs (and similar systems) are just super helpful when it comes to long term development, multiple people working on code, big projects or projects with multiple pieces (like frontend+backend) and it helps AI tools as well.

And this in not something lisps explored much (is there anything at all apart from Racket/typed dialect?), probably due to their dynamic nature. And this is why I dropped lisps in favour of Rust and Typescript.

pfdietz |root |parent |next [-]

SBCL has fine type checking. Some is done at compile time -- you get warnings if something clearly can't be type correct -- but otherwise when compiled with safety 3 (which people tend to make the default) types are checked dynamically at run time. You don't get the program crashing from mistyping as one would in C.

vindarel |root |parent |next |previous [-]

+1 to explore Coalton. It's also talked about on this website and often by its authors.

Links to Coalton and related libraries and apps (included Lem editor's mode and a web playground): https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/#typing

brabel |root |parent |previous [-]

You can run Coalton on Common Lisp. It has a type system similar to Haskell’s. And interops very well with pure Common Lisp. It also modernizes function and type names in the process so it makes Lisp more familiar to modern developers. I tried it in a small project and was impressed.