Why not sockets?

[richard.c...@gmail.com]

Why does Shen not expose native access to sockets? I understand the "keep the core small and optimally portable across languages and environments" ethos, but filesystem IO is supported and I think sockets are almost as essential these days. Not having sockets precludes things like e.g. a native HTTP library which is absolutely table stakes, IMO.

Yes, you can use the implementation's FFI and load some Common Lisp HTTP library, but you cannot do this (to my knowledge? I'd love to be wrong here!) once the lisp image has been created, which means you're not using any of the standard, pre-packaged Shen binaries. You're also deep into the underlying runtime's ecosystem (Which HTTP library is good/supported/performant on that platform? How does TLS work? etc) and that feels fundamentally incorrect. This is also obviously non-portable across implementations!

I regularly encounter problems that would be a great fit to solve with Shen but find myself using other languages because network IO is extremely high friction.