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There's a whole class of Lisp and derivatives, dialects etc that get embedded in applications that are in itself written in such languages, and anyone involved

There's a whole class of Lisp and derivatives, dialects etc that get embedded in applications that are in itself written in such languages, and anyone involved in such applications thinks this is just fine. Out here in the real world, nobody will touch Lisp or anything remotely like it with a 10-foot pole. The real world embeds Python or Lua.

iainctduncan 6y ago
S7 was designed for serious computer music, and comes out of CCRMA at Stanford. While I like Python (I did it professionally for 10+ years!) generally speaking in computer music embedding Python is a non-starter because of the GIL - it does not play well in apps where you have thread and performance issues, which in real time computer music, is basically a given. S7 on the other hand is very easy to use in that context, you can turn the garbage collector on and off, and have multiple instances in different threads with no issue. I really like Python, but have totally given up on it for music applications. There exist Python music libraries, but honestly, no one who really knows that field uses it in apps, though they may use it as a preprocessor for score data.
iainctduncan 6y ago
BTW, out here in the real world where I evaluate tech companies for major investments by private equity firms, I have personally worked on a deal that ended with a $100M investment in a company with a Common Lisp DSL in their modelling engine under the hood. They aren't publicizing this fact, but it happens more than one would think, a lot of tech companies are told by investors not to share their secret sauce. I've done 50+ diligences in the last two years, ranging from $2M to $1.5B transactions. Only two had embedded DSLs, one in lisp and one in their own language that wrote an interpreter for in C. I don't think Python gets embedded much these days to be honest, I've done it and the experience was not pleasant compared to using S7. Though I do know Lua gets used in the game industry.

iainctduncan 6y ago

S7 was designed for serious computer music, and comes out of CCRMA at Stanford. While I like Python (I did it professionally for 10+ years!) generally speaking in computer music embedding Python is a non-starter because of the GIL - it does not play well in apps where you have thread and performance issues, which in real time computer music, is basically a given. S7 on the other hand is very easy to use in that context, you can turn the garbage collector on and off, and have multiple instances in different threads with no issue. I really like Python, but have totally given up on it for music applications. There exist Python music libraries, but honestly, no one who really knows that field uses it in apps, though they may use it as a preprocessor for score data.

iainctduncan 6y ago

BTW, out here in the real world where I evaluate tech companies for major investments by private equity firms, I have personally worked on a deal that ended with a $100M investment in a company with a Common Lisp DSL in their modelling engine under the hood. They aren't publicizing this fact, but it happens more than one would think, a lot of tech companies are told by investors not to share their secret sauce. I've done 50+ diligences in the last two years, ranging from $2M to $1.5B transactions. Only two had embedded DSLs, one in lisp and one in their own language that wrote an interpreter for in C. I don't think Python gets embedded much these days to be honest, I've done it and the experience was not pleasant compared to using S7. Though I do know Lua gets used in the game industry.