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What are the major selling points of Allegro and LispWorks over Emacs with Slime/Sly with regard to the IDE point of view? (Asking so we can skip the graph data

What are the major selling points of Allegro and LispWorks over Emacs with Slime/Sly with regard to the IDE point of view? (Asking so we can skip the graph database and GUI libraries; I'm particularly interested in the developer environment.)

bitwize 6y ago
Actual IDEs, for one.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  That's not even an attempt at making an actual answer. Emacs + Slime already has a REPL, compilation and/or loading of select forms or whole files, syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, completions, debugger, inspector, stepping, cross-references, and most of the other fancy things that are usually associated with IDEs. What do Allegro and LispWorks have that Emacs + Slime don't? What are their selling points? What features make them unique?
  - TurboHaskal 6y ago
    Allegro is the only Lisp with a RAD like GUI designer. Other than that, the IDE is alright but I hate how outdated it looks (they don't even have syntax highlighting and they expect me to put up with an ugly X11 app on macOS). Allegro's selling point is definitely not the IDE and I very much prefer Slime over it. LispWorks also has an interface builder but only works on Windows I'm afraid. I wouldn't say their IDE offers much over Slime if you are a power user, but I really like their function/class browser over using all the slime-who-* commands and how easy to use their debugger is. What sets it apart is that thanks to CAPI it is trivial to build graphical user interfaces to make your own development experience a bit nicer: for example opening up a filesystem dialog instead of asking the user to retype a string, building a graphical monitor to provide insights on the performance of your Lisp image... You get the picture. It feels very Smalltalk-ish.
  - bjoli 6y ago
    I am a schemer today, and my experience with them is over 10 years old. I suspect slime has covered some of the distance between the two. The debugging, tracing and profiling facilities were a lot better than what sbcl+slime offered and there were lots of fancy things like prefilling of inline caches for CLOS.
_ph_ 6y ago
They have a bit more polished UI than Emacs has, which even in the GUI version is mostly a thin shell around a fundamentally character-based UI. Personally, I have stuck mostly to Slime and Emacs, as it works well and I prefer the native Emacs feel. Another advantage of the Emacs route is, that it works with most Lisp implementations, so I was able to use Slime with SBCL and Allegro, sometimes in the same Emacs session :)

bitwize 6y ago

Actual IDEs, for one.

phoe-krk 6y ago
That's not even an attempt at making an actual answer. Emacs + Slime already has a REPL, compilation and/or loading of select forms or whole files, syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, completions, debugger, inspector, stepping, cross-references, and most of the other fancy things that are usually associated with IDEs. What do Allegro and LispWorks have that Emacs + Slime don't? What are their selling points? What features make them unique?
- TurboHaskal 6y ago
  Allegro is the only Lisp with a RAD like GUI designer. Other than that, the IDE is alright but I hate how outdated it looks (they don't even have syntax highlighting and they expect me to put up with an ugly X11 app on macOS). Allegro's selling point is definitely not the IDE and I very much prefer Slime over it. LispWorks also has an interface builder but only works on Windows I'm afraid. I wouldn't say their IDE offers much over Slime if you are a power user, but I really like their function/class browser over using all the slime-who-* commands and how easy to use their debugger is. What sets it apart is that thanks to CAPI it is trivial to build graphical user interfaces to make your own development experience a bit nicer: for example opening up a filesystem dialog instead of asking the user to retype a string, building a graphical monitor to provide insights on the performance of your Lisp image... You get the picture. It feels very Smalltalk-ish.
- bjoli 6y ago
  I am a schemer today, and my experience with them is over 10 years old. I suspect slime has covered some of the distance between the two. The debugging, tracing and profiling facilities were a lot better than what sbcl+slime offered and there were lots of fancy things like prefilling of inline caches for CLOS.

_ph_ 6y ago

They have a bit more polished UI than Emacs has, which even in the GUI version is mostly a thin shell around a fundamentally character-based UI. Personally, I have stuck mostly to Slime and Emacs, as it works well and I prefer the native Emacs feel. Another advantage of the Emacs route is, that it works with most Lisp implementations, so I was able to use Slime with SBCL and Allegro, sometimes in the same Emacs session :)