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I've left as much information as I could, but nobody even bothered taking on the bug. The other bug was "fixed" but no information was provided on when it will

I've left as much information as I could, but nobody even bothered taking on the bug. The other bug was "fixed" but no information was provided on when it will be rolled into the next release, so that's not useful either, especially since Lisp cannot be built without a working Lisp first, which doesn't work now, so I've no way to test the fix. Working on debugging C code and assembler is one thing, working on debugging Lisp another: I have to master Lisp first, but without working SBCL that's not possible and I'm not switching to an inferior OS just to master something I can't later on deploy on illumos / Solaris. I'd spend an inordinate amount of my free time for dubious gain, something I can no longer afford, so much so that I've stopped sinking my precious free time into computers. Why does software often fail to gain acceptance, respectively why does it become successful? Availability.

rjsw 7y ago
There are regular SBCL releases, something that is fixed will appear in a month or less. If you don't have a working SBCL you can bootstrap it using CLISP or cross-compile from a different OS such as FreeBSD.
- Annatar 7y ago
  CLISP doesn't work on Solaris either and I've no FreeBSD nor the spare time to figure out how to get it to work. The only Lisp which works is CCL but when I tried to build SBCL with it, the build failed spectacularly. I then went to use CCL but all the getopts examples are for SBCL and since I'm still learning Lisp I couldn't figure out how to make them work on CCL. So I'm busted. Post scriptum: it's been around six months since I've opened those bug reports for i86pc and sparc and there are still no new releases: http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html I wouldn't have written what I have about SBCL and dismal support for Solaris if I hadn't tried to build, debug, package and research it and research throughly I did. As a professional engineer, the first thing I did was read all the documentation and all the INSTALL instructions I could find as well as any other documentation and bug reports I could locate using multiple search engines; the official documentation is very poor for such a big and serious project and in my opinion as an engineer, not very professional at all, especially when compared to corporate documentation efforts. This creates an additional hurdle for someone looking to master Lisp and do so using SBCL. Pity the two intense weeks of my spare time; what a waste of my life since I'm none the smarter or more knowledgeable for it.
  - rjsw 7y ago
    That platform table doesn't represent what will build, only which binary packages are on Sourceforge. I'm running 1.5.4 on NetBSD/amd64 and can build it on i386, sparc, ppc, arm and arm64.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      NetBSD also happens to be a completely different operating system and pkgsrc is likely to contain NetBSD-specific patches.
      - rjsw 7y ago
        I don't build from pkgsrc.
  - lispm 7y ago
    > The only Lisp which works is CCL How about ABCL? > I wouldn't have written what I have about SBCL and dismal support for Solaris Unfortunately, a niche language implementation & OS combination.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      I get an existential crisis when I read "niche implementation" in the context of one of the most important operating systems which changed computing forever and which is a reference implementation for just about any open standard imaginable and that on an IT site full of IT professionals. Never tried ABCL but will look into it when I get a chance.
lispm 7y ago
> since Lisp cannot be built without a working Lisp first That depends entirely on the Lisp implementation. Some implementations can do this easily. SBCL supports using another CL implementation. One compiles SBCL with that other compiler and then in a next step this then can compile SBCL. SBCL supports building with a few selected other implementations. For example I used recently a version of CLISP in the SBCL compilation process. That's described in the INSTALL documentation. CLISP is usually a bit more portable, since it is written in C and does not use a native code compiler.
- Annatar 7y ago
  SBCL documentation states that it can be built with another Lisp, but that is not true: I've tried with CCL and it failed spectacularly. I couldn't find a working version of CLISP for Solaris 10 for sparc and i86pc. Guys, I've built hundreds of packages for Solaris 10 on both sparc and i86pc the number of which can easily compete with the number of packages on "OpenCSW" and I'm telling you that SBCL is so broken on the operating system from which it came that it can no longer be built or run on it without the involvement of the core SBCL team. It needs serious attention.
  - rjsw 7y ago
    CLISP should build from source, it seems to be getting built fine by Joyent pkgsrc bulk builds. Their build of SBCL is failing in C code [1], maybe a Solaris expert could fix this. The usual reason that SBCL stops building is that something has changed in the OS. [1] http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/pkgsrc/public/reports/upstream-trunk64/20190715.0211/sbcl-1.4.3nb1/build.log http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/pkgsrc/public/reports/upstre...
    - Annatar 7y ago
      But nothing has changed on my build servers which are running Solaris 10, so OS change cannot be the cause; without additional information, that leaves us with one or more breakage(s) caused by someone in the core SBCL team.

rjsw 7y ago

There are regular SBCL releases, something that is fixed will appear in a month or less. If you don't have a working SBCL you can bootstrap it using CLISP or cross-compile from a different OS such as FreeBSD.

Annatar 7y ago
CLISP doesn't work on Solaris either and I've no FreeBSD nor the spare time to figure out how to get it to work. The only Lisp which works is CCL but when I tried to build SBCL with it, the build failed spectacularly. I then went to use CCL but all the getopts examples are for SBCL and since I'm still learning Lisp I couldn't figure out how to make them work on CCL. So I'm busted. Post scriptum: it's been around six months since I've opened those bug reports for i86pc and sparc and there are still no new releases: http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html I wouldn't have written what I have about SBCL and dismal support for Solaris if I hadn't tried to build, debug, package and research it and research throughly I did. As a professional engineer, the first thing I did was read all the documentation and all the INSTALL instructions I could find as well as any other documentation and bug reports I could locate using multiple search engines; the official documentation is very poor for such a big and serious project and in my opinion as an engineer, not very professional at all, especially when compared to corporate documentation efforts. This creates an additional hurdle for someone looking to master Lisp and do so using SBCL. Pity the two intense weeks of my spare time; what a waste of my life since I'm none the smarter or more knowledgeable for it.
- rjsw 7y ago
  That platform table doesn't represent what will build, only which binary packages are on Sourceforge. I'm running 1.5.4 on NetBSD/amd64 and can build it on i386, sparc, ppc, arm and arm64.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    NetBSD also happens to be a completely different operating system and pkgsrc is likely to contain NetBSD-specific patches.
    - rjsw 7y ago
      I don't build from pkgsrc.
- lispm 7y ago
  > The only Lisp which works is CCL How about ABCL? > I wouldn't have written what I have about SBCL and dismal support for Solaris Unfortunately, a niche language implementation & OS combination.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    I get an existential crisis when I read "niche implementation" in the context of one of the most important operating systems which changed computing forever and which is a reference implementation for just about any open standard imaginable and that on an IT site full of IT professionals. Never tried ABCL but will look into it when I get a chance.

lispm 7y ago

> since Lisp cannot be built without a working Lisp first That depends entirely on the Lisp implementation. Some implementations can do this easily. SBCL supports using another CL implementation. One compiles SBCL with that other compiler and then in a next step this then can compile SBCL. SBCL supports building with a few selected other implementations. For example I used recently a version of CLISP in the SBCL compilation process. That's described in the INSTALL documentation. CLISP is usually a bit more portable, since it is written in C and does not use a native code compiler.

Annatar 7y ago
SBCL documentation states that it can be built with another Lisp, but that is not true: I've tried with CCL and it failed spectacularly. I couldn't find a working version of CLISP for Solaris 10 for sparc and i86pc. Guys, I've built hundreds of packages for Solaris 10 on both sparc and i86pc the number of which can easily compete with the number of packages on "OpenCSW" and I'm telling you that SBCL is so broken on the operating system from which it came that it can no longer be built or run on it without the involvement of the core SBCL team. It needs serious attention.
- rjsw 7y ago
  CLISP should build from source, it seems to be getting built fine by Joyent pkgsrc bulk builds. Their build of SBCL is failing in C code [1], maybe a Solaris expert could fix this. The usual reason that SBCL stops building is that something has changed in the OS. [1] http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/pkgsrc/public/reports/upstream-trunk64/20190715.0211/sbcl-1.4.3nb1/build.log http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/pkgsrc/public/reports/upstre...
  - Annatar 7y ago
    But nothing has changed on my build servers which are running Solaris 10, so OS change cannot be the cause; without additional information, that leaves us with one or more breakage(s) caused by someone in the core SBCL team.