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What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

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Javier

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Mar 3, 2009, 11:15:58 PM3/3/09
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What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

Kenneth Tilton

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Mar 3, 2009, 11:57:42 PM3/3/09
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Javier wrote:
> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

CLisp. Better FFI, better MOP. Runs on more than 3% of the worlds computers.

kt

Raffael Cavallaro

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Mar 4, 2009, 12:18:15 AM3/4/09
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On Mar 3, 11:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

ccl/openmcl

lisp threads are native threads
compiler is ridiculously fast, everything is compiled
runs on mac, windows, linux, 32 & 64 bit, intel and ppc
has a mac ide w/ excellent cocoa integration
excellent support from real lisp professionals with decades of
experience - see <http://www.clozure.com/about.html> for a staff
summary - quite impressive

Jason

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Mar 4, 2009, 12:35:22 AM3/4/09
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On Mar 3, 8:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

I like clisp, 'cause it's spunky and it sports a cool menorah on the
splash screen. But its lack of threading bugs the hell out of me, so
I've ended up using SBCL for the native threads on x86 Linux.

I also like Chicken, for purely aesthetic reasons. But, since that's a
scheme environment, forget that I mentioned it...

-Jason

Pascal J. Bourguignon

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Mar 4, 2009, 2:38:10 AM3/4/09
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Jason <jem...@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mar 3, 8:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>
> I like clisp, 'cause it's spunky and it sports a cool menorah on the
> splash screen. But its lack of threading bugs the hell out of me, so
> I've ended up using SBCL for the native threads on x86 Linux.

On the other hand, its lack of threading bugs should elate you rather.

> I also like Chicken, for purely aesthetic reasons. But, since that's a
> scheme environment, forget that I mentioned it...
>
> -Jason

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__

bemcho

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Mar 4, 2009, 3:24:41 AM3/4/09
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On Mar 4, 9:38 am, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote:

> Jason <jeme...@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Mar 3, 8:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
; loading system definition from ccl:tools;asdf-install;asdf-
install.asd.newest into #<Package "ASDF0">
; registering #<SYSTEM ASDF-INSTALL #x858162E> as ASDF-INSTALL
Benchmark Reference OpenMCL64 SBCL
(1.1PPC)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPILER [ 1.76] 1.46 2.88
LOAD-FASL [ 0.91] 1.45 1.88
SUM-PERMUTATIONS [ 3.76] 5.22 0.78
WALK-LIST/SEQ [ 0.09] 0.72 0.30
WALK-LIST/MESS [ 0.06] 0.66 1.72
BOYER [ 10.74] 3.52 0.78
BROWSE [ 0.66] 3.32 1.47
DDERIV [ 0.48] 1.62 1.50
DERIV [ 0.58] 1.46 1.35
DESTRUCTIVE [ 0.54] 1.26 1.55
DIV2-TEST-1 [ 0.53] 2.01 1.84
DIV2-TEST-2 [ 0.63] 1.90 1.90
FFT [ 0.21] 1.85 0.30
FRPOLY/FIXNUM [ 0.68] 3.08 1.49
FRPOLY/BIGNUM [ 0.81] 5.43 1.13
FRPOLY/FLOAT [ 2.44] 1.57 0.55
PUZZLE [ 0.84] 1.02 0.34
TAK [ 0.38] 1.00 1.48
CTAK [ 0.74] 0.95 0.90
TRTAK [ 0.38] 1.01 1.49
TAKL [ 1.41] 1.04 0.49
STAK [ 0.85] 1.02 0.52
FPRINT/UGLY [ 5.06] 1.16 0.40
FPRINT/PRETTY [ 4.50] 1.15 1.06
TRAVERSE [ 1.13] 3.59 0.86
TRIANGLE [ 1.33] 1.03 0.57
RICHARDS [ 1.54] 1.11 1.05
FACTORIAL [ 1.52] 1.41 0.67
FIB [ 0.28] 0.94 3.41
FIB-RATIO [ 0.12] 1.36 1.40
ACKERMANN [ 1.82] 1.97 4.21
MANDELBROT/COMPLEX [ 0.67] 1.13 2.14
MANDELBROT/DFLOAT [ 0.33] 1.09 0.17
MRG32K3A [ 48.27] 3.74 0.03
CRC40 [ 46.89] 0.05 0.50
BIGNUM/ELEM-100-1000 [ 0.95] 2.67 0.34
BIGNUM/ELEM-1000-100 [ 4.22] 3.59 0.13
BIGNUM/ELEM-10000-1 [ 6.60] 2.55 0.08
BIGNUM/PARI-100-10 [ 0.96] 1.55 0.10
BIGNUM/PARI-200-5 [ 11.21] 3.65 0.03
PI-DECIMAL/SMALL [ 17.48] 0.40 0.26
PI-DECIMAL/BIG [ 43.72] 0.22 0.07
PI-ATAN [ 4.43] 1.49 1.63
PI-RATIOS [ 6.50] 2.61 0.56
HASH-STRINGS [ 1.74] 1.71 0.48
HASH-INTEGERS [ 1.80] 1.32 0.82
SLURP-LINES [ 9.73] 1.12 0.69
BOEHM-GC [ 8.70] 7.10 0.45
DEFLATE-FILE [ 1.17] 1.38 1.09
1D-ARRAYS [ 0.05] 1.09 5.22
2D-ARRAYS [ 1.47] 1.55 0.49
3D-ARRAYS [ 3.78] 1.35 0.57
BITVECTORS [ 28.13] 1.64 0.04
BENCH-STRINGS [ 4.80] 1.06 0.23
fill-strings/adjustable [ 48.62] 2.59 0.80
STRING-CONCAT [ 100.21] 1.07 0.89
SEARCH-SEQUENCE [ 3.94] 1.11 0.13
CLOS/defclass [ 0.30] 2.12 14.48
CLOS/defmethod [ 0.14] 1.29 31.07
CLOS/instantiate [ 9.80] 1.25 3.23
CLOS/simple-instantiate [ 29.95] 1.10 0.08
CLOS/methodcalls [ 6.33] 1.52 0.49
CLOS/method+after [ 3.18] 1.64 0.85
CLOS/complex-methods [ 1.52] 1.05 2.27
EQL-SPECIALIZED-FIB [ 1.17] 1.34 0.66
Reference time in first column is in seconds; other columns are
relative
Reference implementation: OpenMCL Version 1.1-pre-070408 (DarwinPPC32)
Impl OpenM: OpenMCL Version 1.1-pre-070408 (DarwinPPC64)
Impl SBCL : SBCL 1.0.3
=== Test machine ===
Machine-type: Power Macintosh
Machine-version: PowerMac8,1

SBCL on Leopard with multi thread support

Mark Wooding

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Mar 4, 2009, 5:29:30 AM3/4/09
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Javier <jav...@gmail.com> writes:

> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

SBCL, because it works very well with SLIME, because it's a full-scale
high-quality compiler which still works well interactively, because it
uses Unicode for text (unlike CMUCL), and because CLisp's pretty printer
is broken.

-- [mdw]

Rob Warnock

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Mar 4, 2009, 5:32:53 AM3/4/09
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Javier <jav...@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------

| What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
+---------------

CMUCL, because it's solid [IME], has a good compiler, and its
interpreter's design means that it's good for "scripting", too:
it starts up *fast* [slightly faster than CLISP, actually, on
the machines I use], and its interpreter does lazy analysis of
DEFUN bodies [which is good if you have large scripts with a
bunch of DEFUNs only a few of which get called on any single
script invocation]. Its "green threads" are also well-integrated
with standard CL stream I/O, and give you automatic non-blocking
I/O when running multiple network connections at the same time
[e.g., when using it as a web application server].

It has some downsides, but none of them currently affect me:

- Only has "green threads" [user-mode coroutines], so threading
only uses a single CPU, and that only on the x86 platforms
(Linux & BSD, mainly). [But all the platforms I currently
run it on are single-CPU, x86 Linux or BSD.]

- Doesn't (yet) run on Windows. [But I don't do Windows.]

- Rebuilding is a bit tricky. [But I tend to run the "-RELEASE"
binaries without ever rebuilding.]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock <rp...@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607

William James

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Mar 4, 2009, 5:51:06 AM3/4/09
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Javier wrote:

> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?


Clojure.

http://clojure.org/

Marko Kocić

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Mar 4, 2009, 6:04:48 AM3/4/09
to
Ecl, because it is full featured CL implementation that treats all
platforms as first class, supports threads, creating native
executables, nice ffi on all platforms. The only thing it lacks is
more people using it, but it changes.

Also, Clojure is pretty nice as a language.

Pillsy

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Mar 4, 2009, 7:31:32 AM3/4/09
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On Mar 3, 11:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

SBCL. It's pretty stable on the Mac, I've gotten very good performance
out of it, and it works well with SLIME. More importantly, though, I'm
most familiar with it and now find it the most comfortable to use.
However, my day job these days requires me to work on Windows
machines, so if I have cause to use CL here, I'll probably shop around
a bit.

Also, it's not a Common Lisp implementation, but PLT Scheme is pretty
freaking cool.

Cheers,
Pillsy

Waldek Hebisch

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Mar 4, 2009, 7:49:31 AM3/4/09
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Javier <jav...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

sbcl:

- gives me best performance
- reasonably safe and fast code by default
- statistical profiler that works on Linux
- reasonable debugging

I also use other implementations: clisp, Closure CL, ecl, gcl
and Poplog clisp. clisp, ecl and gcl mostly for portability: AFAIK
there are platforms where one of them works and all other Lisp
implementations does not work (or at least inexperienced people
trying to build other implementations failed). Closure CL
gives me reasonable fast code (slower than sbcl -- the main
reason is than sbcl profiler allows me to eliminate bottlenecks,
while Closure CL on Linux does not provide statistical profiler
so I do not know where are Closure CL specific bottlenecks)
and very good compilation speed. Poplog clisp gives me low
footprint and very fast compilation, but for me main attraction
of Poplog is that beside Lisp it offers a few other languages.

In the past used cmucl, but now sbcl gives me similar features,
and is more portable and more stable.

--
Waldek Hebisch
heb...@math.uni.wroc.pl

Kazimir Majorinc

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Mar 4, 2009, 9:06:07 AM3/4/09
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On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:15:58 +0100, Javier <jav...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

Newlisp ( http://www.newlisp.org ):

* Simple and easy to learn and use
* Very well suited for metaprogramming:

- Macros are implemented as fexprs in old Lisps.
Advantage: simpler, more expressive. Main argument
against fexprs was that it is harder to write
optimizing compilers. Newlisp is interpreter,
so that disadvantage is not important.
- First class macros.
- Functions and macros are not the result of
evaluation of the definitions, but definitions
itself, can be analyzed and mutated during runtime.
- Dynamic scope.
- Unrestricted eval (access to local variables.)
- Doesn't lose speed or increases size significantly
if code contains lot of evals or macros calls.

* Still in development.
* Friendly community.

Newlisp has other advantages and disadvantages, no doubt,
but this is the answer why I use it. Majority of people
seems to use it because it is good for "scripting."

--
http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com

Kaz Kylheku

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Mar 4, 2009, 1:50:07 PM3/4/09
to
On 2009-03-04, Kazimir Majorinc <fa...@email.address> wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:15:58 +0100, Javier <jav...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>
> Newlisp ( http://www.newlisp.org ):
>
> * Friendly community.

Note that people in computing are friendly when they regard nearly every
permutation of ones and zeros as a good idea.

Unconditional friendliness is a form of stupidity.

André Thieme

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Mar 4, 2009, 1:51:21 PM3/4/09
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Javier schrieb:

> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

I prefer Clojure. The reason is that it greatly improves my productivity
and reduces the cost of development. It runs on all major plattforms and
less work is needed to make it run well. The “Write once, run anywhere”
is not 100% true, but still probably the best out of all plattforms.


André
--
Lisp is not dead. It’s just the URL that has changed:
http://clojure.org/

Dimiter "malkia" Stanev

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Mar 4, 2009, 2:24:55 PM3/4/09
to

Where can I get the poplog distribution - I've googled, but became
confused, at some point I thought it's commercial (although done in an
university).

Dimiter "malkia" Stanev

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Mar 4, 2009, 2:33:25 PM3/4/09
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Javier wrote:
> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

I'm trying to use all open sourced lisps, simply for fun (but otherwise
I do mostly use the commercial versions of LispWorks, Allegro and Corman
- I've bought them all).

From the opensourced I do not have prefference, but I'm finding myself
attached more and more to OpenCL, but I'm also regurarly checking out
all others - ABCL, ECL, GCL, SBCL, CMUCL, etc.

I'm still learning Common Lisp (and various other Lisp) sanyway, so no
problemo here.

I also like Clojure, but Arc never attracted me even much (though Paul
Graham was the man that make me start reading about Lisp, after I read
his Hackers & Painters book).

Waldek Hebisch

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Mar 4, 2009, 5:04:45 PM3/4/09
to
"Dimiter \"malkia\" Stanev" <mal...@mac.com> wrote:

> Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> > and very good compilation speed. Poplog clisp gives me low
> > footprint and very fast compilation, but for me main attraction
> > of Poplog is that beside Lisp it offers a few other languages.
> >
> Where can I get the poplog distribution - I've googled, but became
> confused, at some point I thought it's commercial (although done in an
> university).

Follow links from:

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html

Poplog was commercial in the past, but for several years it is
open-source with MIT-type licence.

--
Waldek Hebisch
heb...@math.uni.wroc.pl

Message has been deleted

GP lisper

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Mar 4, 2009, 7:51:29 PM3/4/09
to
On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:32:53 -0600, <rp...@rpw3.org> wrote:
> Javier <jav...@gmail.com> wrote:
> +---------------
>| What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
> +---------------
>
> CMUCL, because it's solid [IME], has a good compiler, and its

moi aussi

> interpreter's design means that it's good for "scripting", too:

trying to setup crontabs with sbcl was a huge headache...too huge as
it turned out.

> it starts up *fast* [slightly faster than CLISP, actually, on
> the machines I use], and its interpreter does lazy analysis of
> DEFUN bodies [which is good if you have large scripts with a
> bunch of DEFUNs only a few of which get called on any single
> script invocation]. Its "green threads" are also well-integrated
> with standard CL stream I/O, and give you automatic non-blocking
> I/O when running multiple network connections at the same time
> [e.g., when using it as a web application server].

it's also currently faster than SBCL while number crunching. SSE3 vs
387 code, I guess unicode was deemed more important in sbcl.

> It has some downsides, but none of them currently affect me:
>
> - Only has "green threads" [user-mode coroutines], so threading
> only uses a single CPU, and that only on the x86 platforms
> (Linux & BSD, mainly). [But all the platforms I currently
> run it on are single-CPU, x86 Linux or BSD.]
>
> - Doesn't (yet) run on Windows. [But I don't do Windows.]
>
> - Rebuilding is a bit tricky. [But I tend to run the "-RELEASE"
> binaries without ever rebuilding.]

The binaries always rebuild themselves. In a few minutes of user
time, I have a CMUCL that matches any libs in my system
(i.e. openmotif) and picks up a little something from the CFLAGS. I
can count on all legacy code to work as well as in the prior years.

..and it doesn't have a phoney 'Common Lisp' tag.

Xah Lee

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Mar 5, 2009, 12:08:14 AM3/5/09
to
On Mar 3, 8:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

my fav is Emacs Lisp.

Because it is practical. More or less the most widely used lisp today.

Considered as a tool, it has probably some 10 times more users than
either Common Lisp or Scheme Lisp.

For example, i consider emacs lisp, more powerful than Perl, as a text
processing language, for 2 major reasons: (1) It has buffer datatype
and associated datatypes such as point, marker, region, etc.. Which is
more powerful than treating text as inert chars and lines, which Perl,
Python, Ruby, etc do. (2) elisp's integrated nature with emacs. This
means, for odd text manipulation jobs that happens daily in every
software coding, i can write text processing programs that interact
with me while i edit.

The above paragraph, details why i love emacs lisp. However, it is not
so much about lisp language's nature. I find nothing in particular of
lisp lang's features of emacs lisp that made me love emacs lisp, other
than it being a functional language. It's more about how it happens
that emacs has a embedded lang and that happens to be a lisp. It is
not difficult to have another language, or a new editor with a embeded
lang that functions similar to emacs, or a editor with a engine that
supports multiple langs. However, emacs just happens to be almost the
only one, or the most prominent one. (i am a expert in Microsoft Word
in early 1990s, and although i haven't ventured into its Visual Basic,
but i know it can do scripting. I'm sure, now after almost 20 years,
and with Microsoft's “.NET”, it possibly might compete with emacs with
its elisp, but i know nothing about it to comment further. (i'd very
much welcome any comment from someone who are a expert of scripting
Microsoft Word with Visual Basic; on how it compares to emacs, if at
all. (if you don't have say 1 year of full-time experience in this,
please spare me your motherfucking drivel)))

As to the reason i am not a fan of the 2 other major lisps: Common
Lisp and Scheme Lisp. These 2, are little used in the industry. Common
Lisp is a moribund dinosaur. Scheme Lisp is little used and is
confined to Academia. There is nothing in these 2 langs that i
consider elegant or powerful today. I would, in a blink of a eye,
consider Mathematica, OCaml, Haskell, erlang, far more elegant or
powerful.

I would like to see Common Lisp and or Scheme Lisp die a miserable,
horrid, deaths, due to fanaticism as exhibited by Common Lisp and
Scheme Lisp regulars in newsgroups. I consider these 2 langs not only
impractical and inelegant, but their people are the hog of any
possible progress of lisp in general.

See also:

• Language, Purity, Cult, and Deception
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lang_purity_cult_deception.html

I do consider lisp, or the lisp way, a lang with lisp characteristics,
can be the most beautiful, elegant language. (in fact, i consider
Mathematica being one such example) However, given the social milieu
of the 3 major lisp communities: Common Lisp, Scheme Lisp, Emacs Lisp,
it might happen when pigs fly.

--------------

Of the existing lisps, especially new ones, i support NewLisp, and i
also support Clojure. Personally, i'm not likely to invest time in
them in the next 5 years, if ever. Second to these, i mildly support
Qi.

I was a avid fan of functional programing, and was a big fan of lisp
too. Lisp, even just 10 years ago, was still a great language, almost
the only one that are much better than all others, in both practical
industry use and also academic theoretical considerations. But due to
the rapid development of software technologies and vast number of lang
today that happened in the past decade, including a profusion of
quality functional langs, i see little point in lisp.

See also:

• Proliferation of Computing Languages
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/new_langs.html

Xah
http://xahlee.org/


Kenneth Tilton

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Mar 5, 2009, 12:27:39 AM3/5/09
to
Xah Lee wrote:
> On Mar 3, 8:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>
> my fav is Emacs Lisp.
>
> Because it is practical. More or less the most widely used lisp today.

So you think the Amsterdam 737 was being flown by Emacs Lisp? Pilot
keychord error? Maybe it was a perfect landing in the wrong buffer...

hth,kt

Xah Lee

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Mar 5, 2009, 12:29:00 AM3/5/09
to
On Mar 4, 9:08 pm, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ... I was a avid fan of functional programing

Correction: I _am_. Still am.

The essay is now clearned up a bit and archived at:

http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/whats_your_fav_lisp.html

Xah
http://xahlee.org/


Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:08:52 AM3/5/09
to
Kenneth Tilton escribió:

Do you actually use it? For what?

Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:10:04 AM3/5/09
to
Raffael Cavallaro escribió:

I recently switched to 64bits, so I probably test it out.
Do you think it has got good Linux support?

Pascal J. Bourguignon

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:11:40 AM3/5/09
to
Javier <jav...@gmail.com> writes:

I use it to develop lisp programs (better debugger), to write all my
scripts, to run most of my lisp programs and servers.

(Only in some cases, when I want to use packages that run only on
sbcl, do I run sbcl. And I'd think that once threading is completed
in clisp, these packages will support it as well, and I could stay
with clisp even more often).

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__

Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:13:12 AM3/5/09
to
Mark Wooding escribió:

I've been "using" it for some time, it was the only real alternative on
OSX Intel32, and it works just perfect on Linux.
So, for what are you using SBCL?

Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:13:52 AM3/5/09
to
William James escribi�:

Do you have any project on mind for using it?

Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:14:36 AM3/5/09
to
Pillsy escribi�:

Have you done any project on SBCL?

Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:16:14 AM3/5/09
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Kaz Kylheku escribi�:

Unilateralism is also a form of stupidity.

Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:17:53 AM3/5/09
to
André Thieme escribió:

> Javier schrieb:
>> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>
> I prefer Clojure. The reason is that it greatly improves my productivity
> and reduces the cost of development. It runs on all major plattforms and
> less work is needed to make it run well. The “Write once, run anywhere”
> is not 100% true, but still probably the best out of all plattforms.

Have you done any remarkable project?

I think I would probably like Clojure.

Javier

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Mar 5, 2009, 3:43:20 AM3/5/09
to
Xah Lee escribió:

> On Mar 3, 8:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>
> my fav is Emacs Lisp.
>
> Because it is practical. More or less the most widely used lisp today.

Interesting.
Do you actually consider yourself an Emacs expert?

>
> Considered as a tool, it has probably some 10 times more users than
> either Common Lisp or Scheme Lisp.
>
> For example, i consider emacs lisp, more powerful than Perl, as a text
> processing language,

Oh, I think no people has ever done any comparative of these two
languages. Are you preparing a more in deep comparative or something
like that? I truly would like to read your expert opinion, apart from
this very breve observations:

> for 2 major reasons: (1) It has buffer datatype
> and associated datatypes such as point, marker, region, etc.. Which is
> more powerful than treating text as inert chars and lines, which Perl,
> Python, Ruby, etc do. (2) elisp's integrated nature with emacs. This
> means, for odd text manipulation jobs that happens daily in every
> software coding, i can write text processing programs that interact
> with me while i edit.
>
> The above paragraph, details why i love emacs lisp.

That's nice.


> However, it is not
> so much about lisp language's nature. I find nothing in particular of
> lisp lang's features of emacs lisp that made me love emacs lisp, other
> than it being a functional language.

Do you think Emacs Lisp is probably the most functional Lisp of all the
Lisps?

> It's more about how it happens
> that emacs has a embedded lang and that happens to be a lisp. It is
> not difficult to have another language, or a new editor with a embeded
> lang that functions similar to emacs, or a editor with a engine that
> supports multiple langs. However, emacs just happens to be almost the
> only one, or the most prominent one. (i am a expert in Microsoft Word
> in early 1990s, and although i haven't ventured into its Visual Basic,
> but i know it can do scripting. I'm sure, now after almost 20 years,
> and with Microsoft's “.NET”, it possibly might compete with emacs with
> its elisp, but i know nothing about it to comment further. (i'd very
> much welcome any comment from someone who are a expert of scripting
> Microsoft Word with Visual Basic; on how it compares to emacs, if at
> all. (if you don't have say 1 year of full-time experience in this,
> please spare me your motherfucking drivel)))

Oh this is very boring, please forget Microsoft Word.

>
> As to the reason i am not a fan of the 2 other major lisps: Common
> Lisp and Scheme Lisp. These 2, are little used in the industry.

I didn't know. Thank you for the advise.

> Common
> Lisp is a moribund dinosaur.

This is very interesting.

> Scheme Lisp is little used and is
> confined to Academia. There is nothing in these 2 langs that i
> consider elegant or powerful today. I would, in a blink of a eye,
> consider Mathematica, OCaml, Haskell, erlang, far more elegant or
> powerful.

What are your experiences with those languages?

>
> I would like to see Common Lisp and or Scheme Lisp die a miserable,
> horrid, deaths, due to fanaticism as exhibited by Common Lisp and
> Scheme Lisp regulars in newsgroups.


Oh this is definitively not going to like people here.

> I consider these 2 langs not only
> impractical and inelegant, but their people are the hog of any
> possible progress of lisp in general.

As I see your page, have you done any study on this phenomena?

>
> See also:
>
> • Language, Purity, Cult, and Deception
> http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lang_purity_cult_deception.html
>
> I do consider lisp, or the lisp way, a lang with lisp characteristics,
> can be the most beautiful, elegant language. (in fact, i consider
> Mathematica being one such example) However, given the social milieu
> of the 3 major lisp communities: Common Lisp, Scheme Lisp, Emacs Lisp,
> it might happen when pigs fly.

Do you have any ideas on how to achieve that elegance?

>
> --------------
>
> Of the existing lisps, especially new ones, i support NewLisp, and i
> also support Clojure. Personally, i'm not likely to invest time in
> them in the next 5 years, if ever. Second to these, i mildly support
> Qi.

It is nice to see you supports... I'll have a glance to those languages.

>
> I was a avid fan of functional programing, and was a big fan of lisp
> too. Lisp, even just 10 years ago, was still a great language, almost
> the only one that are much better than all others, in both practical
> industry use and also academic theoretical considerations. But due to
> the rapid development of software technologies and vast number of lang
> today that happened in the past decade, including a profusion of
> quality functional langs, i see little point in lisp.
>
> See also:
>
> • Proliferation of Computing Languages
> http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/new_langs.html
>
> Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄

Thanks for your nice opinion.

Javier

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 3:44:57 AM3/5/09
to
Kenneth Tilton escribió:

You shut up and read Xah Lee more carefully, he has expressed very
expert and interesting thoughts. ;)

Rob Warnock

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 4:51:55 AM3/5/09
to
GP lisper <spam...@clouddancer.com> wrote:
+---------------

| <rp...@rpw3.org> wrote:
| > CMUCL, because it's solid [IME], has a good compiler, and its
|
| moi aussi
...

| > - Rebuilding is a bit tricky. [But I tend to run the "-RELEASE"
| > binaries without ever rebuilding.]
|
| The binaries always rebuild themselves. In a few minutes of user
| time, I have a CMUCL that matches any libs in my system
| (i.e. openmotif) and picks up a little something from the CFLAGS.
| I can count on all legacy code to work as well as in the prior years.
+---------------

Oh, I can rebuild it (now that I know how); it's just sometimes
a bit tricky to build one version with another. [E.g., CMUCL-19e
wouldn't run on my laptop's old version of FreeBSD, so I had to
rebuild it using a CMUCL-19c that *did* run on the old version
of FreeBSD.]

+---------------


| ..and it doesn't have a phoney 'Common Lisp' tag.

+---------------

Can you explain what you mean by that? Its name *is*
"CMU Common Lisp" (CMUCL) after all, and it *does* claim
to be an ANSI CL:

cmu> (defun feature-grep (tag)
(remove (string tag) *features* :key #'string :test-not #'search))

FEATURE-GREP
cmu> (feature-grep 'lisp)

(:COMMON-LISP)
cmu> (feature-grep 'ansi)

(:ANSI-CL)
cmu>


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock <rp...@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607

Kenneth Tilton

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 6:30:46 AM3/5/09
to

> Javier <jav...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Kenneth Tilton escribió:
>>> Javier wrote:
>>>> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>>> CLisp. Better FFI, better MOP. Runs on more than 3% of the worlds
>>> computers.
>>>
>>> kt
>> Do you actually use it? For what?

I do a lot of open software and there was a time when I actually cared
whether the yobbos of the world could run my stuff easily so I got
in-depth experience of a lot of Lisps (and even other languages) with
relatively few hours of use.

I also happend to be there at the elbow and saw CLisp go from worst to
first on FFI* and then AMOP.**

kt

* even so I would code to CFFI if CLisp were my normal Lisp.

** At this pace I expect a CLisp browser plugin complete with JS FFI any
day now. And wouldn't that be heaven...

Curt Micol

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 6:56:04 AM3/5/09
to
On Mar 5, 3:11 am, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote:

> > Do you actually use it? For what?
>
> I use it to develop lisp programs (better debugger), to write all my
> scripts, to run most of my lisp programs and servers.  
>
> (Only in some cases, when I want to use packages that run only on
>  sbcl, do I run sbcl. And I'd think that once threading is completed
>  in clisp, these packages will support it as well, and I could stay
>  with clisp even more often).

May I ask what you use for web serving then? I've been using
Hunchentoot but I know it relies on threading quite a bit. Clisp has
me curious though, I do have it installed I just haven't went further
than that with it.

I am new at lisp and use SBCL since it seems to run on Mac and FreeBSD
pretty well. I have finally finished getting all of the pieces into
place (Emacs, Slime and SBCL) and look forward to finally getting Lisp
code out into the wild. We'll see how it goes. :)

Mark Wooding

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 6:47:18 AM3/5/09
to
Javier <jav...@gmail.com> writes:

> So, for what are you using SBCL?

Mostly system administration stuff at the moment. I generate my DNS
zone files from a description in Lisp, and do something similar for my
SSH configuration files. There are a number of other things I want to
do, but they depend on a big pile of other projects (in C, for
interworking with other languages, unfortunately).

-- [mdw]

Pillsy

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 7:39:02 AM3/5/09
to
On Mar 5, 3:14 am, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Pillsy escribi :

> > On Mar 3, 11:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> >> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?

> > SBCL.
[...]


> Have you done any project on SBCL?

Yes; a largish, fairly complex Monte Carlo simulation. I found the
profiler and the ability (working with SLIME) to annotate Lisp buffers
with hints for improving performance to be very useful, in addition to
all the "ordinary" benefits of using Common Lisp: interactive
programming at the REPL, and using the inspector and debugger in
tandem, and being able to code in a language that provides a lot of
expressiveness and power.

Cheers,
Pillsy

Pascal J. Bourguignon

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 8:20:52 AM3/5/09
to
Curt Micol <ase...@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mar 5, 3:11 am, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
> wrote:
>> > Do you actually use it? For what?
>>
>> I use it to develop lisp programs (better debugger), to write all my
>> scripts, to run most of my lisp programs and servers.  
>>
>> (Only in some cases, when I want to use packages that run only on
>>  sbcl, do I run sbcl. And I'd think that once threading is completed
>>  in clisp, these packages will support it as well, and I could stay
>>  with clisp even more often).
>
> May I ask what you use for web serving then? I've been using
> Hunchentoot but I know it relies on threading quite a bit. Clisp has
> me curious though, I do have it installed I just haven't went further
> than that with it.

I've got a web server running on Hunchentoot/sbcl.


> I am new at lisp and use SBCL since it seems to run on Mac and FreeBSD
> pretty well. I have finally finished getting all of the pieces into
> place (Emacs, Slime and SBCL) and look forward to finally getting Lisp
> code out into the wild. We'll see how it goes. :)

In any case, we're lucky to have a language with various
implementations, each with its own strong points. So we can use
several implementations (notably during development) to get all the
benefits. Eg. when there's an elusive bug when running on sbcl, I
usually find it easily when running on clisp. When there's code to be
compiled, compiling it with sbcl gives more nitpicking errors or
warnings, so I'd use sbcl as a "front-end" compiler to clisp just to
improve code quality. And similar things can be said of the other
implementations.

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__

Raffael Cavallaro

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 10:25:58 AM3/5/09
to
On Mar 5, 3:10 am, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I recently switched to 64bits, so I probably test it out.
> Do you think it has got good Linux support?

I don't use linux much so I couldn't say. Personally, I think ccl is
at its best in two areas:

1. speed of compilation (i.e., how long it takes to compile a large
system, not necessarily the speed of the compiled code, though that's
respectable as well)

2. Mac OS X/Cocoa integration.

If you're constantly recompiling a large system, CCL is great. If
you're doing Mac OS X Cocoa programming, CCL is unmatched, even by
LispWorks commercial Cocoa interface.

Raymond Toy

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 10:22:31 AM3/5/09
to
>>>>> "GP" == GP lisper <spam...@CloudDancer.com> writes:

GP> it's also currently faster than SBCL while number crunching. SSE3 vs
GP> 387 code, I guess unicode was deemed more important in sbcl.

I'm pretty sure SBCL has sse2 because CMUCL borrowed the instruction
definitions from SBCL. :-) I think, however, that sse2 is only used with
the 64-bit version.

And CMUCL doesn't really use sse3; it's sse2. But I did post an sse3
complex multiply vop that can be used. It's quite a bit faster than
the sse2 version.

Ray

Curt Micol

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 3:26:24 PM3/5/09
to
On Mar 5, 8:20 am, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote:

> In any case, we're lucky to have a language with various
> implementations, each with its own strong points.  So we can use
> several implementations (notably during development) to get all the
> benefits.  Eg. when there's an elusive bug when running on sbcl, I
> usually find it easily when running on clisp.  When there's code to be
> compiled, compiling it with sbcl gives more nitpicking errors or
> warnings, so I'd use sbcl as a "front-end" compiler to clisp just to
> improve code quality.  And similar things can be said of the other
> implementations.

I agree, although I must admit it was a little daunting. Coming from
VIM and Python (mostly) to a new editor and a half dozen
implementations is a bit crazy. I'll be honest it's been a struggle,
but now that I am here it seems easy to "stay here". It took a lot of
recompiling and Emacs hacking to get everything working correctly. I
hope to do a writeup at some point of getting started. There are a
number of those tutorials already out there, but they all provide some
good points and then generalities. Maybe I can come up with something
different.

Mind if I ask which editor you use for your various lisp hackings?
Just curious.

Xah Lee

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 4:15:46 PM3/5/09
to

On Mar 5, 12:43 am, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting.
> Do you actually consider yourself an Emacs expert?

Using emacs daily, pretty much whole day, since about late 1998.
Learning & coding elisp on and off seriously, since 2006.
Written many text processing scripts, a major mode
(• Emacs xlsl-mode for Linden Scripting Language
http://xahlee.org/sl/ls-emacs.html
), and written a book on emacs and elisp.

• Xah's Emacs Tutorial
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs.html

I am a emacs expert. I'm also a elisp expert in the context of
programing industry. But when compared to dedicated emacs developers,
i'm rather a beginner. For example, some corners of elisp i still
don't understand quite well: its display mechanism, faces, overlay,
windows and frames, events loop.

>> For example, i consider emacs lisp, more powerful than Perl, as a text
>> processing language,
>
>Oh, I think no people has ever done any comparative of these two
>languages. Are you preparing a more in deep comparative or
>something like that? I truly would like to read your expert

>opinion, ...

See:

• Text Processing: Elisp vs Perl
http://xahlee.org/emacs/elisp_text_processing_lang.html

> Do you think Emacs Lisp is probably the most functional Lisp of

> all the Lisps? What are your experiences with those languages?


> As I see your page, have you done any study on this phenomena?

> Do you have any ideas on how to achieve that elegance?

you have also lots of one-sentence questions. You will find some
answers here:

http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_essays_index.html

which is a index page of collection of essays related to emacs. About
15 of them, are related to lisp in general. Each page usually has
“Related Essays” links at the bottom that takes you to other essays on
the topic, giving you more detail, or covering other aspects.

I recommend to start with the following, more quality ones:

• Fundamental Problems of Lisp
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems.html

• The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully
Nested Notations
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/notations.html

• What are OOP's Jargons and Complexities
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t2/oop.html

> Thanks for your nice opinion.

Thank you. I enjoy teaching.

Xah
http://xahlee.org/


Jon Harrop

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 4:33:01 PM3/5/09
to

Do any open source Lisp implementations have concurrent GCs?

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u

André Thieme

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 4:29:53 PM3/5/09
to
Javier schrieb:

Yes, professionally/commercially. It works exceptionally well for us
(we came from Common Lisp, but Clojure makes us more productive) and
we are not the only ones. In Freenodes #Clojure there are several more
people who already use Clojure commercially.
It’s unstability basically means that Rich Hickey does not stop to
improve it even further, and give us more abstractions.
We are doing mostly AI stuff, but also some GUI frontends for it, and
server side apps.


> I think I would probably like Clojure.

If you are interested in the Lisp language family, then there is a good
chance that you could like it.


André
--
Lisp is not dead. It’s just the URL that has changed:
http://clojure.org/

André Thieme

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 4:48:16 PM3/5/09
to
Jon Harrop schrieb:

> Do any open source Lisp implementations have concurrent GCs?

I am not sure if Clojure has one right now, but in 1-2 months
Java 6 Update 14 will appear and get one feature from Java 7 that
was found to be mature and stable enough: the G1 Garbage Collector:
http://research.sun.com/jtech/pubs/04-g1-paper-ismm.pdf

Francogrex

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 6:08:34 PM3/5/09
to
On Mar 4, 12:04 pm, Marko Kocić <marko.ko...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ecl, because it is full featured CL implementation that treats all
> platforms as first class, supports threads, creating native
> executables, nice ffi on all platforms. The only thing it lacks is
> more people using it, but it changes.

ECL is my favourite as well. because of what you mentioned and also
because you can embed C code. Great advantage.

Javier

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 8:11:16 PM3/5/09
to
André Thieme escribió:

>> Have you done any remarkable project?
>
> Yes, professionally/commercially. It works exceptionally well for us
> (we came from Common Lisp, but Clojure makes us more productive) and
> we are not the only ones. In Freenodes #Clojure there are several more
> people who already use Clojure commercially.
> It’s unstability basically means that Rich Hickey does not stop to
> improve it even further, and give us more abstractions.
> We are doing mostly AI stuff, but also some GUI frontends for it, and
> server side apps.
>
>
>> I think I would probably like Clojure.
>
> If you are interested in the Lisp language family, then there is a good
> chance that you could like it.
>
>
> André

Nice! I'll learn it.

GP lisper

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 8:39:09 PM3/5/09
to
On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:22:31 -0500, <raymo...@stericsson.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "GP" == GP lisper <spam...@CloudDancer.com> writes:
>
> GP> it's also currently faster than SBCL while number crunching. SSE3 vs
> GP> 387 code, I guess unicode was deemed more important in sbcl.
>
> I'm pretty sure SBCL has sse2 because CMUCL borrowed the instruction
> definitions from SBCL. :-) I think, however, that sse2 is only used with
> the 64-bit version.

That might be it, as I ran your butterfly test in SBCL and it had the
same timings as the x87 core. I'll run it on the 64 bit SBCL and see
if the speed improves. Still, Kudos to you for bringing it to 32bit
land, considering how long ago 387s had to be added to motherboards.


> And CMUCL doesn't really use sse3; it's sse2. But I did post an sse3
> complex multiply vop that can be used. It's quite a bit faster than
> the sse2 version.

:-)

naturally, I monitor cmucl mailing list and check /proc/cpuinfo
after all, speed kills

GP lisper

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 8:45:53 PM3/5/09
to
On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:51:55 -0600, <rp...@rpw3.org> wrote:
>
> Oh, I can rebuild it (now that I know how); it's just sometimes
> a bit tricky to build one version with another. [E.g., CMUCL-19e
> wouldn't run on my laptop's old version of FreeBSD, so I had to
> rebuild it using a CMUCL-19c that *did* run on the old version
> of FreeBSD.]

I just skip ahead, and use a snapshot to handle the cross-compiler
nits


>| ..and it doesn't have a phoney 'Common Lisp' tag.
> +---------------
>
> Can you explain what you mean by that? Its name *is*
> "CMU Common Lisp" (CMUCL) after all, and it *does* claim
> to be an ANSI CL:

"it" in my statement referred to CMUCL

it's the other pseudolisps proclaiming CL that lack dozens of pieces
of the language I was referring too. Absence of any conformance data
shows that BS up pretty fast.

Rob Warnock

unread,
Mar 5, 2009, 9:48:14 PM3/5/09
to
Mark Wooding <m...@distorted.org.uk> wrote:
+---------------
+---------------

Let me second Mark's recommendation of CL as a generic "file
generation language" [even though I use CMUCL instead of SBCL]:

- The obvious web stuff: Write/maintain in format X, run an X_to_HTML
conversion scripts (in CL) whenever the source tree changes.
[Fun choices for X include: sexps (HTOUT/CL-WHO), TML, LML, Wiki-style,
TeX-like, PCL <http://www.gigamonkeys.com/lisp/markup/>, etc.]
And that's not even including *active* web pages written in CL!

- Generating C source code [mainly but not exclusively header files].
The looping features of FORMAT are *very* nice when building C
tables, e.g., this bit clipped from a previous article of mine
<news:F-udnZ3s2r7vWELb...@speakeasy.net> [Sept'07]:

I use it [the |0X| printing function shown earlier]
a lot when building data initialization tables in C code:

> (let ((data (loop for i below 24 nconc (list (random 0x100000000)
(random 256))))
(instance "georgey"))
(format t "~%foo_t ~a_foos[~d] = {~
~%~{~<~%~1,68:; {~/0x/, ~2/0x/}~>~^,~}~%};~%"
instance (/ (length data) 2) data))

foo_t georgey_foos[24] = {
{0x21a41a5c, 0x87}, {0x1c63b86e, 0xb4}, {0x894c25d5, 0xa1},
{0x9979b7fe, 0xbb}, {0xc2ad44aa, 0x4d}, {0xe2826239, 0x70},
{0x053b537e, 0x05}, {0x6ac226e8, 0xbe}, {0x1252ea73, 0x20},
{0xe3001d4a, 0x12}, {0x9a006313, 0x31}, {0x299d2f64, 0x54},
{0x90feb745, 0xda}, {0xc7ed257b, 0xc1}, {0xa6e8e18a, 0x51},
{0x0fdb8569, 0xed}, {0x713c27e0, 0xa8}, {0xd975dbac, 0x2d},
{0xb4263772, 0x85}, {0xe6cdaaa9, 0x48}, {0x7db24d29, 0xf8},
{0x87e5aa36, 0xa3}, {0xb56e3dd7, 0xe2}, {0x3cf23443, 0x4e}
};
NIL
>

At a PPoE I even got them to add CMUCL to the "approved" set of
build tools so I could use it to parse somebody else's really nasty
ad-doc documentation file and construct a set of mapping tables
[relating kernel disk drive numbers to disk drive bay numbers,
LED driver chip I2C addresses & register bits, & power control
chip I2C addresses & register bits] into ".h" & ".c" files which
then got compiled into a Linux kernel driver. ;-}

- Talking to SQL databases. [I use PostgreSQL and Marsden's PG.]
'Nuff said.

- Misc. system administration "scripting" stuff. My "~/bin/" directory
has over 50 CMUCL scripts in it [as well as a couple of dozen leftover
MzScheme scripts from before I moved over the The Dark Side!].

Javier

unread,
Mar 6, 2009, 6:36:30 AM3/6/09
to
Pascal J. Bourguignon escribió:

> Javier <jav...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Kenneth Tilton escribió:
>>> Javier wrote:
>>>> What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>>> CLisp. Better FFI, better MOP. Runs on more than 3% of the worlds
>>> computers.
>>>
>>> kt
>> Do you actually use it? For what?
>
> I use it to develop lisp programs (better debugger), to write all my
> scripts, to run most of my lisp programs and servers.
>
> (Only in some cases, when I want to use packages that run only on
> sbcl, do I run sbcl. And I'd think that once threading is completed
> in clisp, these packages will support it as well, and I could stay
> with clisp even more often).
>

Why do you prefer Clisp over SBCL?

Pascal J. Bourguignon

unread,
Mar 6, 2009, 8:48:44 AM3/6/09
to
Javier <jav...@gmail.com> writes:

I take Kenneth's words:

>>>> CLisp. Better FFI, better MOP. Runs on more than 3% of the worlds

and repeat mine:

>> X xxx xx xx xxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx (better debugger), xx xxxxx xxx xx


I'd also mention that you don't need slime to use clisp effectively
ie. you can use clisp in a terminal, you don't necessarily need
emacs+slime.

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__

John DeSoi

unread,
Mar 6, 2009, 10:25:52 AM3/6/09
to
Raffael Cavallaro wrote:

> 2. Mac OS X/Cocoa integration.
>
> If you're constantly recompiling a large system, CCL is great. If
> you're doing Mac OS X Cocoa programming, CCL is unmatched, even by
> LispWorks commercial Cocoa interface.
>

Hi Raffael,

Could you give a few points about why the CCL Cocoa interface is better
than the LispWorks implementation? I have not used CCL, but now you have
me interested :).

Thanks,

John DeSoi, Ph.D.

Elena

unread,
Mar 18, 2009, 3:55:29 PM3/18/09
to
On 5 Mar, 06:08, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mar 3, 8:15 pm, Javier <javu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What open source implementation of Lisp do you prefer and why?
>
> my fav is Emacs Lisp.
>
> Because it is practical.

I agree. And it just works, on many many platforms. Full IDE (debugger/
stepper included): perfect for beginners. Plenty of libraries: useful
to advanced users.

William D Clinger

unread,
Mar 18, 2009, 4:31:48 PM3/18/09
to
André Thieme quoting Jon Harrop:

> > Do any open source Lisp implementations have concurrent GCs?
>
> I am not sure if Clojure has one right now, but in 1-2 months
> Java 6 Update 14 will appear and get one feature from Java 7 that
> was found to be mature and stable enough: the G1 Garbage Collector:http://research.sun.com/jtech/pubs/04-g1-paper-ismm.pdf

Gambit already has a soft real-time GC, and Ypsilon has a parallel
GC (but I'm not sure whether it's concurrent). I know of others
under development, and there are likely to be some I don't know
about.

Will

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