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Common Lisp Implementations in 2023

248 points by oumua_don17 4y ago

tmtvl 4y ago
No love for NPT (<https://github.com/nptcl/npt https://github.com/nptcl/npt>)? Well, I get it, it is very, very new. One note about ABCL is that it doesn't support TCO, which the Common Lisp spec doesn't mandate. For people who want a Lisp on the JVM and really want tail calls, I would recommend checking out Kawa (<https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html>).
- abecedarius 4y ago
  So, say what's promising about NPT? The readme doesn't try to; neither does the first page of the docs.
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    The documentation (B1_Using) does explain that: > npt was developed with the intention of embedding it in the C language. Kind of like Guile, but Common Lisp rather than Scheme.
    - abecedarius 4y ago
      Thanks. Someone coming to this project page cold is not going to find that third-level sub-page unless they're motivated; the table of contents doesn't reveal that that's where they'll find a rationale. Hope this helps.
u89012 4y ago
I just spent months working on a large piece of software and could say without a doubt, Lisp is awesome! But I also want to say that most implementations are hashing out a spec written decades ago and not trying to improve what's obviously lacking -- a full modern standard library! Trying to piece together functionality from here and there (and Quicklisp which is an unversioned mess) will only take you so far and in the end you will realize the amount of time wasted chasing this great language! AFAIK Lisp needs more backing from the heavyweights to make any reasonable progress which I'm sure won't happen.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Good comments. Quicklisp has certainly helped. A few years ago, after Common Lisp being my favorite language since around 1982, I thought that I might switch for my personal projects to Racket Scheme since it does have good library support. What holds me back is that I have found plentiful work opportunities over the last several decades with Common Lisp, but except for getting paid by Springer-Verlag to write a Scheme book, I have never been paid to use Scheme. Also, to be really honest, so much of my work in the last ten years has involved deep learning, that I have somewhat reluctantly learned to love Python for writing short programs.
- can3p 4y ago
  I think every programmer that tries common lisp eventually comes to the same conclusion, however none of the new versions of "standard" libraries got any traction to my knowledge. Usually it's used only by the author who created it which makes their code unique in some sense, like a recent post from Ron Garret [0]. The spec is really valued by cl community and I guess I'll tell an unpopular opinion now, but I think there could be a place for an ecosystem built around one of the compilers like sbcl with all the old cruft removed and a really good all purpose standard library (similar in capabilities to the one of go for example). What that will achieve is that it will allow new developers to write the code without reading on why the things were designed is a certain way 40 years ago because of now forgotten os or hardware limitation. Similar to what was done with neovim project [0]: http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited....
  - lispegistus 4y ago
    What part of Common Lisp would you consider old cruft and what value would removing it bring to the language that would offset the value we have from having one of the most stable language definitions still in use? I can think of a few dusty parts of the language that are rarely used today but it's perfectly safe to ignore. Lisp has a good all purpose library ecosystem, it's just informal rather than baked into the language, and I haven't had any significant issues with quicklisp since it came out however many years ago. Writing portable common lisp is not at all difficult and there is no problem like with say Scheme of one library needing a specific compiler. And libraries tend to have a long shelf-life too. How much of Python's standard library is old cruft with better alternative packages available now for example? Didn't they have to prune a bunch of stuff in the python2->3 transition? There is considerable risk in including standard libraries in a standard, and the risk is that those libraries will end up being outdated eventually. You want to add more potential for more old cruft to be in Lisp and then pruned again? Why? Just use quicklisp or one of it's alternatives that are cropping up. Lisp is not Go, it's an agreement between many different parties about what lisp is, it's not a codebase under the defacto control of one organization, or even an informal group or "community". This is extremely valuable and recent events around Go show why, I am extremely glad that I never payed much attention to Go because honestly I cannot trust it's governance model, but a specification that hasn't been and won't be updated in decades I can trust completely, and if one implementation betrays that trust, I can always move to one of the many alternatives listed in the OP. sidenote: > I think every programmer that tries common lisp eventually comes to the same conclusion if this refers to "Lisp needs more backing from the heavyweights", then OH GODS PLEASE NOOO! I want to write code that will run in a year without modification and won't have some corporation put spyware in my compiler while trying to convince me it's for my own good and have my IDE slurp my code to train some LLM to make it easier to pile even more pointless unmaintainable code upon the world. The "heavyweights" have shown themselves very poor stewards of the discipline of computing indeed.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I always like seeing Common Lisp links, but personally I was a bit put off by the very strong anti-commercial comments about LispWorks and Franz. I had a business idea requiring Common Lisp a few years ago and I purchased a LispWorks Professional license. Small standalone executables with a tree shaker [1] and I has received very good support without paying for the high priority support service. I also paid the maintenance fee last year for continued updates. Coincidentally, I am an advisor and chief architect for a small AI company and they use LispWorks also. Many years ago, I worked as a consultant on a medical AI project and my customer paid a fair amount of money to Franz for software licensing and tech support that included helping with development. Incredibly useful! I also love open source Common Lisp and Scheme implementations. Anyway, I would respectfully suggest to the author to maybe tone down the rhetoric a bit since different individual developers and companies have different requirements. [1] you can also make small standalone apps with SBCL by building from source and setting a flag to allow compressed heap files.
- galdor 4y ago
  The commercial aspect is not a problem in my opinion (but again english is not my main language so I might have conveyed the wrong tone). The issue is the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start, but is simply out of touch with independant developers and small companies exploring the possibility of using Common Lisp. Open sourcing Lispworks and selling support contracts and an enterprise version (with CAPI, CORBA, etc.) would make more sense. The world has changed: all other languages have open source implementations; most servers are open source, most databases too. It is hard to convince a company to use Common Lisp, but even harder to justify paying for a proprietary implementation. And for me personally, Lispworks would force me to buy two licenses (Linux and FreeBSD) for personal use, and two for my solo company. It simply does not make any sense financially speaking.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    > The issue is the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start, but ... That's a much more nuanced way to put it - compared to "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone".
smcn 4y ago
There was a great comment about LispWorks over on the reddit discussion, linked here[0]. I really need to give it a shot at some point, especially as someone doing CL professionally. I know that Lisp is popular on HN but that it's mostly a kind of zoo like experience where the proper devs come here to gawk at us but I really cannot recommend it enough for any kind of work. We use it for stock market analysis but almost every piece of code we write is CL. I'm currently trying to convince people to switch over our CSS over to LASS[1]. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/comment/j9l0zt6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/commen... 1: https://github.com/Shinmera/LASS https://github.com/Shinmera/LASS
galdor 4y ago
First time one of my articles lands on HN! Feel free to ask any follow up question.
zetalyrae 4y ago
Common Lisp implementations in 2023: - SBCL Everything else is de-facto dead or in a proprietary silo.
- jackdaniel 4y ago
  /me gasps - how rude! :~)
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Thanks for keeping ECL running Daniel!
- anta40 4y ago
  What about GCL? "NEW! (20230113) GCL 2.6.14 is released"
  - zetalyrae 4y ago
    Never heard of anyone using it. AIUI not standards-compliant. LGPL for a Common Lisp impl. is not something I want to touch with a ten foot pole.
  - galdor 4y ago
    I tried to use it when writing my article. It could not even load my initialization file because it is not standard compliant (it does not support the :VERBOSE argument of COMPILE-FILE). The fact that they use GCC under the hood is interesting though, I'd be curious to see how fast it can get. But standard compliance comes first.
- eggy 4y ago
  What about Clasp or ABCL?
  - vindarel 4y ago
    ABCL got a new release just today! https://abcl-dev.blogspot.com/2023/02/abcl-191-never-use-dot-oh.html https://abcl-dev.blogspot.com/2023/02/abcl-191-never-use-dot...
RefreshingView 4y ago
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- knome 4y ago
  Are RefreshingView, FunnyGuy567, SultrySiren6, and GirlFunk87 all someone spamming the site with gpt bots? How annoying. edit: TropicalDelight, SimplySweet4, WonderWeirdo0, WickedlyCool and SoulmateTravels as well.
  - frou_dh 4y ago
    Seems like there is virtually copy/paste from old comments, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34910103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34910103 I remember reading the original https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32324797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32324797
RockinOut 4y ago
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SimplySweet4 4y ago
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account-5 4y ago
I would like to learn Lisp but am easily confused with where to start. What implementation do I use? On a general level do I start with CL, schema, racket, etc (apologies I know this thread is about common lisp). It's all very confusing. I'm like this with most things, like I want to learn Forth too but have that same problem. I learned vanilla JavaScript because I didn't know where to start with the 1000+ frameworks; and as a result am learning flutter/dart for cross platform apps. Any advice would be much appreciated!
- galdor 4y ago
  In my opinion, the simplest way is to start with Common Lisp, with SBCL and the Practical Common Lisp book by Peter Seibel. Make sure you are comfortable with Emacs. It is possible to write Common Lisp without it, but Emacs and SLIME are so much better than anything else it feels like cheating.
  - serf 4y ago
    >..simplest way >..make sure you are comfortable with Emacs. As an emacs user myself, I must say -- that's a high bar for trying to digest a new language.
    - mikedelago 4y ago
      Agree, it's kind of a pain. There is ALIVE for vscode and VLIME for vim which are fine for just getting started. and more: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
    - User23 4y ago
      On the plus side there is a fair amount of conceptual overlap between Elisp and Common Lisp. Learning Lisp really is more learning a complete development environment; a development philosophy even. Sure you can write Lisp as you would C, editing in a basic editor and then compiling and running the complete program in a a shell, but it’s really missing the point. While that reduces the learning curve significantly, it reduces the benefits even more.
GirlFunk87 4y ago
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SultrySiren6 4y ago
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FunnyGuy567 4y ago
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SoulmateTravels 4y ago
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VictoriousMan 4y ago
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LegendaryPlayer 4y ago
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WickedlyCool 4y ago
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jackdaniel 4y ago
ECL license is LGPL-2.1-or-later (not LGPL2), the same applies to Clasp (which was forked from ECL). n.b isn't this thread infested with bots? 4 or 5 nicks created 4 days ago with incomplete messages..
- galdor 4y ago
  Indeed, corrected. Thank you! I'm not sure what is happening, there are multiple small posts which look like spam, with green nicknames. Edit: green nicknames are from new accounts. On this page, all of them are spam. At some point it would make sense to just hide them all.
  - jackdaniel 4y ago
    the correction is not really correct - you say lgpl-2.1 without the "or later version". It is sometimes abbreviated ls LGPL-2.1+, but SPDX identifier is preferable since it is semi-standard for abbreviating license names.
TropicalDelight 4y ago
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WonderWeirdo0 4y ago
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tsimionescu 4y ago
It may be worth mentioning that CLASP is one of the only languages/runtime systems that can interoperate with C++ code directly - say, to catch C++ exceptions, or pass around std::vector<T> and so on. It's also quite remarkable that the project was started by a chemistry researcher.
- ahefner 4y ago
  I used to use ECL a bit, and in hindsight I really wish it emitted C++ rather C, even if the generated code was only using C features.
  - pritambaral 4y ago
    I've used ECL in C++ mode, to interface with ClickHouse (which is a massive C++ codebase).
MinxJinx42 4y ago
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Ashemush8 4y ago
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147 4y ago
There's a weird spike in new accounts with what appear to be AI generated comments in this thread. One problem I run into when learning Common Lisp is ASDF. For some reason I can't figure out how to use it properly. For example, when I open a system definition in a new REPL, what's the expected workflow? I'm using emacs and slime by the way. Maybe my environment is set up wrong. I also have to prefix the `defsystem`s with `asdf:`. When I look at examples in open source projects they just straight up use `uiop` functions and `defsystem` in their `.asd` files without the package.
- galdor 4y ago
  What do you mean by "open [...] in a new REPL"? You use ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM to have ASDF load all the content of the system, making it available to you.
  - 147 4y ago
    I edited the comment to add some additional details. Am I not supposed to load or compile the contents of an `.asd` file?
    - galdor 4y ago
      No you do not have to. ASDF knows where to find your ASD files: https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/asdf.html#Configuring-ASDF-to-find-your-systems https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/asdf.html#Configuring-ASDF-to-f... Personally I use the (:tree (:home "dev/lisp")) form.
      - 147 4y ago
        Thanks a lot for this actually. I just gave it a shot and it seems to have been the piece I've been missing.
        aidenn0 4y ago
        You can load the contents of a .asd file (this can be useful when developing on versions other than what you want in your ASDF search path). It is unnecessary outside of that use case though.
AnnieMannie8 4y ago
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- codr7 4y ago
  Interesting! CL & embedded sounds like a dream job to me.
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SeanLuke 4y ago
> The free “Personal Edition” limits the program size and the amount of time it can run, making it pretty much useless for anything but evaluation. Also very good for education purposes.
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l_theanine 4y ago
Are there any serious attempts at reworking the Common Lisp standard for more modern problems? I know the space is active, but when I see the old bright yellow CLHS linked to from documentation sites, I just frown a bit. The Lisp community very nearly goes out of its way to be unhospitable to the younger generation of coders, and downright dismissive of modern techniques like containers and DevOps practices. Not that the Scheme community is doing a radically better job, but at least the RnRS standard is marching forward at an acceptable pace. A few years ago there was CL21, but it didn't really garner enough support from the community to really take form into anything worthwhile. I think we need a "Lisp for 20XX" council or something to gather up ideas and begin a reconstruction era for Lisp in this century.
- vindarel 4y ago
  re CLHS, there is a new rendering, much more welcoming and practical! https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html (a search box, syntax highlighting!!)
  - l_theanine 4y ago
    Indeed, that is VERY nice! That's exactly the type of upgrade I bet a lot of people can appreciate. The search is particularly crisp, feels instantaneous.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  The GCL documentation (browsable with an info browser, like Emacs) contains a fairly complete reference of the standard.
- blue039 4y ago
  This is just not true... > I know the space is active, but when I see the old bright yellow CLHS linked to from documentation sites, I just frown a bit. This is how documentation has been FOREVER. The newer documentation is not necessarily better. In fact, I find the "forced by the compiler" type docs that come from Rust et al to be infuriating at times. PyDoc is no better. I much prefer the terse documentation when I need to know something for sure rather than just copy-pasting examples out of docs. > downright dismissive of modern techniques like containers and DevOps practices. Citation needed? Lisp containerizes just fine. Unless you mean hand-holding-via-blog-post which yeah, I guess the community can be hostile. If you hang around the IRC people are often very helpful. The greybeards in the field are very experienced and very intelligent. To be crass, many of these "modern" developers you refer to need a LOT of handholding. CL doesn't provide this handholding. Honestly, it is no harder than getting actual work done in Haskell. You spend a lot of time in documentation and not a lot of people can help you. Of those people that can, your problem is not hard enough to interest them because they are VERY good. That being said I had no problem at all getting help from the community IRC and mailing lists. As far as I can tell CL is fine for the 21st century. A more streamlined package system would be nice but quicklisp and ASDF aren't that complicated. Frankly, I dont think you've spent any time working in CL at any real size. You could argue it doesnt scale well across large teams and that'd be fair. Your other criticisms though...don't make sense and don't align with my experience at all.
Wininger5 4y ago
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GamersFever0 4y ago
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mkh 4y ago
One should note that while it is true that the last CLISP release was a long time ago and there is not a lot of development going on right now, it's not dead. Bruno Haible just commited last week. The repository is now at https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp
- cellularmitosis 4y ago
  That is exactly the problem, there have been many commits to HEAD but no release for 12 years??? It isn’t dead, it is undead. Strange.
  - rurban 4y ago
    Not strange. The new generational GC does not work yet on Windows. libsigsegv esp. which signals out of memory conditions, which triggers a major GC. Any windows assembler help there appreciated.
WinningHero9 4y ago
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- vindarel 4y ago
  That is not the same author, so I don't understand your comment.
WinningTeam9 4y ago
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InterruptingCow 4y ago
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dutchblacksmith 4y ago
Lispworks starts with an affordable hobbyist edition. There is also a hobbyist development edition.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Sorry, I have to disagree. €500-600 for just the ability to use the IDE but not being able to create an executable doesn't sound very appealing to me. And that all limited to "non-commercial" use. And per platform. So you can't just switch between different OSes.
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vindarel 4y ago
This LispWorks comment on reddit is very interesting: --- [cite] As a Lispworks user, yes it is super pricey, but it does make sense for certain people. Arguably, Lispworks provides features that aren't available in any other programming language, Lisp or not. * Support for just about every platform I can imagine. Yes it's expensive, but if I want to port to a new platform I can pay Lispworks, and get it over with. It'll mostly work without too much changes. It works on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, and some really obscure systems. * Application delivery with tree shaking. May be there are other languages that do this, but I haven't worked with something like this before in my career. (Maybe proguard for Java, but that's very rudimentary compared to LW's delivery). The tool I work on delivers a binary that people need to download during the CI jobs for every run, so having it be 100MB is way too big. After compression, my LW delivered binaries come to around 9MB. * You mention support being expensive. Actually, for simple support questions LW does a pretty good job of responding back to you. I've asked tonnes of questions over the years, and have not paid for a separate support contract apart from the yearly maintenance contract. I suspect they like people asking questions, because then they fix those bugs and it becomes even more rock solid. * The documentation is glorious. And in the off-chance that I need to know something that's not documented, I just mail them and they'll respond usually by the next working day. * Very stable Java support (although the API could be better), let's me use the entire Java ecosystem of libraries when I need it. * The platform itself is rock-solid. Now SBCL is fantastic, but when I ran my servers on SBCL, I would have a crash every now and then. With LW, I can have my server running weeks (current uptime is a month) with reloading code multiple times a day, and everything is still super stable. There's more, but I think the rest is more negotiable. For instance, the FLI is a lot more polished than using CFFI, which makes a huge difference in productivity when writing native code. Or the fact that its remote-debugger facility can be used as a very stable protocol to programmatically control a remote LW process. I don't use the IDE btw, so I'm not even considering that. I don't use CAPI either, but I mean to someday. 2023, Arnold @tdrhq of Screenshotbot (https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss) on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/common_lisp_implementations_in_2023/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/common... [/cite]
- aidenn0 4y ago
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mikedelago 4y ago
I had a great time writing common lisp for the better part of 2022, including doing about half of Advent of Code in it. It's such an awesome language and once you get an understanding of macros, it really does feel powerful. Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a wall. I don't really have any personal projects to work with CL, and if I used CL (or any lisp/scheme dialect for that matter) at work I'd be in trouble. Nice to have in the back pocket though, and I'm excited to reach for it in the future.
matrix12 4y ago
Franz releases updates continuously bringing in new features. The update.sh handles these patches, and new items.
hvs 4y ago
For a period much earlier in my career (think early 00's) I seriously desired to work in Common Lisp professionally. Through a series of life decisions and other opportunities, that never really happened. But I continued to work on Lisp projects on my own and use it for various things. I don't consider it a "superpower," and I don't think it makes me 10x more productive or anything like that. Most modern languages have stolen most of the thunder from Lisp (other than macros) so I would be hard-pressed to recommend it for greenfield development. That said, I love working in it. I don't have any illusions that it will make a "comeback" or that I will ever make money writing it (I long ago switched to looking for job opportunities based on the problem domain rather than the toolset), but I continue to use it personally because it makes me happier than any other language.
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orthecreedence 4y ago
Sad to see Clozure CL abandoned, that was my main squeeze back in my lisp days (I was on Windows and SBCL wasn't cut out for it at the time). How's SBCL on Windows these days?
- kazinator 4y ago
  CCL is not "abandoned". I recently brushed the dust off an application that I last released in 2014. It uses CCL on Windows. I was pleased to see there is a recent new version from 2021. I upgraded to that and did some new work, making new releases.
  - orthecreedence 4y ago
    Well, that's good, but the article made it sound like it was no more. Maybe it's just that it's feature-complete.
    - lispm 4y ago
      There are bugs which have not been fixed, maybe they are - who knows. For example on ARM processor it dies in multiprocessing. Next: CCL comes originally from the Mac platform (the original Coral Lisp started on the early Mac, Apple even owned Macintosh Common Lisp for a few years, that code was used to create OpenMCL, aka Clozure CL) and there is still no Apple Silicon port and there is no real progress to get there.
kazinator 4y ago
CLISP is excellent for learning Common Lisp; it has a readline-based REPL with editing and tab completion, so you don't need anything other than the CLISP installation. The licensing server back end for the Tankan kanji learning application runs on CLISP.
noloblo 4y ago
if sbcl significantly faster than racket why and when do practitioners use racket?
- _ph_ 4y ago
  What do you mean by that? A lot of people use racket, a lot of people use SBCL, which is indeed significantly faster. They are actually completely different software for different purposes and very different strengths.
  - noloblo 4y ago
    what are strengths of sbcl over racket? what are strengths of racket over sbcl? if sbcl raw speed > racket speed wouldn't most expert lispers by default choose sbcl? what purposes does racket uniquely serve not served by sbcl?
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      > what are strengths of sbcl over racket? SBCL is a Common Lisp implementation, racket implements variants of Scheme. SBCL is natively compiled, creates standalone executables. > what are strengths of racket over sbcl? It implements various scheme dialects, the ability to integrate different languages in one image is unique. It offers an integrated enviroment with a lot of libraries included, that is why it is popular in academia. > if sbcl raw speed > racket speed wouldn't most expert lispers by default choose sbcl? First of all, they implement different programming languages, that means they are not competing directly with each other and are very different beasts as discribed above. Racket seems to be very popular in academia, while SBCL is more used for practical software development. At least that is the impression I have. > what purposes does racket uniquely serve not served by sbcl? I think I have answered that above.
      - lispm 4y ago
        > the ability to integrate different languages in one image is unique Somehow. It should be possible to load a C, Prolog and Python implementations into one sbcl image. The Symbolics Lisp Machine emulator I use comes with C, Pascal, Fortran, several Common Lisp variants, Lisp Machine Lisp in one image. Kalman Reti once gave a demo how to debug mixed Lisp and C code in a REPL on such a Lisp Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk
chris_armstrong 4y ago
Compared to languages that have a single implementation, have multiple commercial and open source implementations in reasonable states of continuous development seems like a good place to be.

248 points by oumua_don17 4y ago

No love for NPT (<https://github.com/nptcl/npt https://github.com/nptcl/npt>)? Well, I get it, it is very, very new. One note about ABCL is that it doesn't support TCO, which the Common Lisp spec doesn't mandate. For people who want a Lisp on the JVM and really want tail calls, I would recommend checking out Kawa (<https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html>).

abecedarius 4y ago
So, say what's promising about NPT? The readme doesn't try to; neither does the first page of the docs.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  The documentation (B1_Using) does explain that: > npt was developed with the intention of embedding it in the C language. Kind of like Guile, but Common Lisp rather than Scheme.
  - abecedarius 4y ago
    Thanks. Someone coming to this project page cold is not going to find that third-level sub-page unless they're motivated; the table of contents doesn't reveal that that's where they'll find a rationale. Hope this helps.

u89012 4y ago

I just spent months working on a large piece of software and could say without a doubt, Lisp is awesome! But I also want to say that most implementations are hashing out a spec written decades ago and not trying to improve what's obviously lacking -- a full modern standard library! Trying to piece together functionality from here and there (and Quicklisp which is an unversioned mess) will only take you so far and in the end you will realize the amount of time wasted chasing this great language! AFAIK Lisp needs more backing from the heavyweights to make any reasonable progress which I'm sure won't happen.

mark_l_watson 4y ago
Good comments. Quicklisp has certainly helped. A few years ago, after Common Lisp being my favorite language since around 1982, I thought that I might switch for my personal projects to Racket Scheme since it does have good library support. What holds me back is that I have found plentiful work opportunities over the last several decades with Common Lisp, but except for getting paid by Springer-Verlag to write a Scheme book, I have never been paid to use Scheme. Also, to be really honest, so much of my work in the last ten years has involved deep learning, that I have somewhat reluctantly learned to love Python for writing short programs.
can3p 4y ago
I think every programmer that tries common lisp eventually comes to the same conclusion, however none of the new versions of "standard" libraries got any traction to my knowledge. Usually it's used only by the author who created it which makes their code unique in some sense, like a recent post from Ron Garret [0]. The spec is really valued by cl community and I guess I'll tell an unpopular opinion now, but I think there could be a place for an ecosystem built around one of the compilers like sbcl with all the old cruft removed and a really good all purpose standard library (similar in capabilities to the one of go for example). What that will achieve is that it will allow new developers to write the code without reading on why the things were designed is a certain way 40 years ago because of now forgotten os or hardware limitation. Similar to what was done with neovim project [0]: http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited....
- lispegistus 4y ago
  What part of Common Lisp would you consider old cruft and what value would removing it bring to the language that would offset the value we have from having one of the most stable language definitions still in use? I can think of a few dusty parts of the language that are rarely used today but it's perfectly safe to ignore. Lisp has a good all purpose library ecosystem, it's just informal rather than baked into the language, and I haven't had any significant issues with quicklisp since it came out however many years ago. Writing portable common lisp is not at all difficult and there is no problem like with say Scheme of one library needing a specific compiler. And libraries tend to have a long shelf-life too. How much of Python's standard library is old cruft with better alternative packages available now for example? Didn't they have to prune a bunch of stuff in the python2->3 transition? There is considerable risk in including standard libraries in a standard, and the risk is that those libraries will end up being outdated eventually. You want to add more potential for more old cruft to be in Lisp and then pruned again? Why? Just use quicklisp or one of it's alternatives that are cropping up. Lisp is not Go, it's an agreement between many different parties about what lisp is, it's not a codebase under the defacto control of one organization, or even an informal group or "community". This is extremely valuable and recent events around Go show why, I am extremely glad that I never payed much attention to Go because honestly I cannot trust it's governance model, but a specification that hasn't been and won't be updated in decades I can trust completely, and if one implementation betrays that trust, I can always move to one of the many alternatives listed in the OP. sidenote: > I think every programmer that tries common lisp eventually comes to the same conclusion if this refers to "Lisp needs more backing from the heavyweights", then OH GODS PLEASE NOOO! I want to write code that will run in a year without modification and won't have some corporation put spyware in my compiler while trying to convince me it's for my own good and have my IDE slurp my code to train some LLM to make it easier to pile even more pointless unmaintainable code upon the world. The "heavyweights" have shown themselves very poor stewards of the discipline of computing indeed.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I always like seeing Common Lisp links, but personally I was a bit put off by the very strong anti-commercial comments about LispWorks and Franz. I had a business idea requiring Common Lisp a few years ago and I purchased a LispWorks Professional license. Small standalone executables with a tree shaker [1] and I has received very good support without paying for the high priority support service. I also paid the maintenance fee last year for continued updates. Coincidentally, I am an advisor and chief architect for a small AI company and they use LispWorks also. Many years ago, I worked as a consultant on a medical AI project and my customer paid a fair amount of money to Franz for software licensing and tech support that included helping with development. Incredibly useful! I also love open source Common Lisp and Scheme implementations. Anyway, I would respectfully suggest to the author to maybe tone down the rhetoric a bit since different individual developers and companies have different requirements. [1] you can also make small standalone apps with SBCL by building from source and setting a flag to allow compressed heap files.

galdor 4y ago
The commercial aspect is not a problem in my opinion (but again english is not my main language so I might have conveyed the wrong tone). The issue is the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start, but is simply out of touch with independant developers and small companies exploring the possibility of using Common Lisp. Open sourcing Lispworks and selling support contracts and an enterprise version (with CAPI, CORBA, etc.) would make more sense. The world has changed: all other languages have open source implementations; most servers are open source, most databases too. It is hard to convince a company to use Common Lisp, but even harder to justify paying for a proprietary implementation. And for me personally, Lispworks would force me to buy two licenses (Linux and FreeBSD) for personal use, and two for my solo company. It simply does not make any sense financially speaking.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > The issue is the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start, but ... That's a much more nuanced way to put it - compared to "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone".

smcn 4y ago

There was a great comment about LispWorks over on the reddit discussion, linked here[0]. I really need to give it a shot at some point, especially as someone doing CL professionally. I know that Lisp is popular on HN but that it's mostly a kind of zoo like experience where the proper devs come here to gawk at us but I really cannot recommend it enough for any kind of work. We use it for stock market analysis but almost every piece of code we write is CL. I'm currently trying to convince people to switch over our CSS over to LASS[1]. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/comment/j9l0zt6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/commen... 1: https://github.com/Shinmera/LASS https://github.com/Shinmera/LASS

galdor 4y ago

First time one of my articles lands on HN! Feel free to ask any follow up question.

zetalyrae 4y ago

Common Lisp implementations in 2023: - SBCL Everything else is de-facto dead or in a proprietary silo.

jackdaniel 4y ago
/me gasps - how rude! :~)
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Thanks for keeping ECL running Daniel!
anta40 4y ago
What about GCL? "NEW! (20230113) GCL 2.6.14 is released"
- zetalyrae 4y ago
  Never heard of anyone using it. AIUI not standards-compliant. LGPL for a Common Lisp impl. is not something I want to touch with a ten foot pole.
- galdor 4y ago
  I tried to use it when writing my article. It could not even load my initialization file because it is not standard compliant (it does not support the :VERBOSE argument of COMPILE-FILE). The fact that they use GCC under the hood is interesting though, I'd be curious to see how fast it can get. But standard compliance comes first.
eggy 4y ago
What about Clasp or ABCL?
- vindarel 4y ago
  ABCL got a new release just today! https://abcl-dev.blogspot.com/2023/02/abcl-191-never-use-dot-oh.html https://abcl-dev.blogspot.com/2023/02/abcl-191-never-use-dot...

RefreshingView 4y ago

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knome 4y ago
Are RefreshingView, FunnyGuy567, SultrySiren6, and GirlFunk87 all someone spamming the site with gpt bots? How annoying. edit: TropicalDelight, SimplySweet4, WonderWeirdo0, WickedlyCool and SoulmateTravels as well.
- frou_dh 4y ago
  Seems like there is virtually copy/paste from old comments, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34910103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34910103 I remember reading the original https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32324797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32324797

RockinOut 4y ago

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SimplySweet4 4y ago

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account-5 4y ago

I would like to learn Lisp but am easily confused with where to start. What implementation do I use? On a general level do I start with CL, schema, racket, etc (apologies I know this thread is about common lisp). It's all very confusing. I'm like this with most things, like I want to learn Forth too but have that same problem. I learned vanilla JavaScript because I didn't know where to start with the 1000+ frameworks; and as a result am learning flutter/dart for cross platform apps. Any advice would be much appreciated!

galdor 4y ago
In my opinion, the simplest way is to start with Common Lisp, with SBCL and the Practical Common Lisp book by Peter Seibel. Make sure you are comfortable with Emacs. It is possible to write Common Lisp without it, but Emacs and SLIME are so much better than anything else it feels like cheating.
- serf 4y ago
  >..simplest way >..make sure you are comfortable with Emacs. As an emacs user myself, I must say -- that's a high bar for trying to digest a new language.
  - mikedelago 4y ago
    Agree, it's kind of a pain. There is ALIVE for vscode and VLIME for vim which are fine for just getting started. and more: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
  - User23 4y ago
    On the plus side there is a fair amount of conceptual overlap between Elisp and Common Lisp. Learning Lisp really is more learning a complete development environment; a development philosophy even. Sure you can write Lisp as you would C, editing in a basic editor and then compiling and running the complete program in a a shell, but it’s really missing the point. While that reduces the learning curve significantly, it reduces the benefits even more.

GirlFunk87 4y ago

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jackdaniel 4y ago

ECL license is LGPL-2.1-or-later (not LGPL2), the same applies to Clasp (which was forked from ECL). n.b isn't this thread infested with bots? 4 or 5 nicks created 4 days ago with incomplete messages..

galdor 4y ago
Indeed, corrected. Thank you! I'm not sure what is happening, there are multiple small posts which look like spam, with green nicknames. Edit: green nicknames are from new accounts. On this page, all of them are spam. At some point it would make sense to just hide them all.
- jackdaniel 4y ago
  the correction is not really correct - you say lgpl-2.1 without the "or later version". It is sometimes abbreviated ls LGPL-2.1+, but SPDX identifier is preferable since it is semi-standard for abbreviating license names.

TropicalDelight 4y ago

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tsimionescu 4y ago

It may be worth mentioning that CLASP is one of the only languages/runtime systems that can interoperate with C++ code directly - say, to catch C++ exceptions, or pass around std::vector<T> and so on. It's also quite remarkable that the project was started by a chemistry researcher.

ahefner 4y ago
I used to use ECL a bit, and in hindsight I really wish it emitted C++ rather C, even if the generated code was only using C features.
- pritambaral 4y ago
  I've used ECL in C++ mode, to interface with ClickHouse (which is a massive C++ codebase).

MinxJinx42 4y ago

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147 4y ago

There's a weird spike in new accounts with what appear to be AI generated comments in this thread. One problem I run into when learning Common Lisp is ASDF. For some reason I can't figure out how to use it properly. For example, when I open a system definition in a new REPL, what's the expected workflow? I'm using emacs and slime by the way. Maybe my environment is set up wrong. I also have to prefix the `defsystem`s with `asdf:`. When I look at examples in open source projects they just straight up use `uiop` functions and `defsystem` in their `.asd` files without the package.

galdor 4y ago
What do you mean by "open [...] in a new REPL"? You use ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM to have ASDF load all the content of the system, making it available to you.
- 147 4y ago
  I edited the comment to add some additional details. Am I not supposed to load or compile the contents of an `.asd` file?
  - galdor 4y ago
    No you do not have to. ASDF knows where to find your ASD files: https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/asdf.html#Configuring-ASDF-to-find-your-systems https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/asdf.html#Configuring-ASDF-to-f... Personally I use the (:tree (:home "dev/lisp")) form.
    - 147 4y ago
      Thanks a lot for this actually. I just gave it a shot and it seems to have been the piece I've been missing.
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        You can load the contents of a .asd file (this can be useful when developing on versions other than what you want in your ASDF search path). It is unnecessary outside of that use case though.

AnnieMannie8 4y ago

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codr7 4y ago
Interesting! CL & embedded sounds like a dream job to me.

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SeanLuke 4y ago

> The free “Personal Edition” limits the program size and the amount of time it can run, making it pretty much useless for anything but evaluation. Also very good for education purposes.

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l_theanine 4y ago

Are there any serious attempts at reworking the Common Lisp standard for more modern problems? I know the space is active, but when I see the old bright yellow CLHS linked to from documentation sites, I just frown a bit. The Lisp community very nearly goes out of its way to be unhospitable to the younger generation of coders, and downright dismissive of modern techniques like containers and DevOps practices. Not that the Scheme community is doing a radically better job, but at least the RnRS standard is marching forward at an acceptable pace. A few years ago there was CL21, but it didn't really garner enough support from the community to really take form into anything worthwhile. I think we need a "Lisp for 20XX" council or something to gather up ideas and begin a reconstruction era for Lisp in this century.

vindarel 4y ago
re CLHS, there is a new rendering, much more welcoming and practical! https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html (a search box, syntax highlighting!!)
- l_theanine 4y ago
  Indeed, that is VERY nice! That's exactly the type of upgrade I bet a lot of people can appreciate. The search is particularly crisp, feels instantaneous.
tmtvl 4y ago
The GCL documentation (browsable with an info browser, like Emacs) contains a fairly complete reference of the standard.
blue039 4y ago
This is just not true... > I know the space is active, but when I see the old bright yellow CLHS linked to from documentation sites, I just frown a bit. This is how documentation has been FOREVER. The newer documentation is not necessarily better. In fact, I find the "forced by the compiler" type docs that come from Rust et al to be infuriating at times. PyDoc is no better. I much prefer the terse documentation when I need to know something for sure rather than just copy-pasting examples out of docs. > downright dismissive of modern techniques like containers and DevOps practices. Citation needed? Lisp containerizes just fine. Unless you mean hand-holding-via-blog-post which yeah, I guess the community can be hostile. If you hang around the IRC people are often very helpful. The greybeards in the field are very experienced and very intelligent. To be crass, many of these "modern" developers you refer to need a LOT of handholding. CL doesn't provide this handholding. Honestly, it is no harder than getting actual work done in Haskell. You spend a lot of time in documentation and not a lot of people can help you. Of those people that can, your problem is not hard enough to interest them because they are VERY good. That being said I had no problem at all getting help from the community IRC and mailing lists. As far as I can tell CL is fine for the 21st century. A more streamlined package system would be nice but quicklisp and ASDF aren't that complicated. Frankly, I dont think you've spent any time working in CL at any real size. You could argue it doesnt scale well across large teams and that'd be fair. Your other criticisms though...don't make sense and don't align with my experience at all.

Wininger5 4y ago

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mkh 4y ago

One should note that while it is true that the last CLISP release was a long time ago and there is not a lot of development going on right now, it's not dead. Bruno Haible just commited last week. The repository is now at https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp

cellularmitosis 4y ago
That is exactly the problem, there have been many commits to HEAD but no release for 12 years??? It isn’t dead, it is undead. Strange.
- rurban 4y ago
  Not strange. The new generational GC does not work yet on Windows. libsigsegv esp. which signals out of memory conditions, which triggers a major GC. Any windows assembler help there appreciated.

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vindarel 4y ago
That is not the same author, so I don't understand your comment.

WinningTeam9 4y ago

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dutchblacksmith 4y ago

Lispworks starts with an affordable hobbyist edition. There is also a hobbyist development edition.

_ph_ 4y ago
Sorry, I have to disagree. €500-600 for just the ability to use the IDE but not being able to create an executable doesn't sound very appealing to me. And that all limited to "non-commercial" use. And per platform. So you can't just switch between different OSes.

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vindarel 4y ago

This LispWorks comment on reddit is very interesting: --- [cite] As a Lispworks user, yes it is super pricey, but it does make sense for certain people. Arguably, Lispworks provides features that aren't available in any other programming language, Lisp or not. * Support for just about every platform I can imagine. Yes it's expensive, but if I want to port to a new platform I can pay Lispworks, and get it over with. It'll mostly work without too much changes. It works on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, and some really obscure systems. * Application delivery with tree shaking. May be there are other languages that do this, but I haven't worked with something like this before in my career. (Maybe proguard for Java, but that's very rudimentary compared to LW's delivery). The tool I work on delivers a binary that people need to download during the CI jobs for every run, so having it be 100MB is way too big. After compression, my LW delivered binaries come to around 9MB. * You mention support being expensive. Actually, for simple support questions LW does a pretty good job of responding back to you. I've asked tonnes of questions over the years, and have not paid for a separate support contract apart from the yearly maintenance contract. I suspect they like people asking questions, because then they fix those bugs and it becomes even more rock solid. * The documentation is glorious. And in the off-chance that I need to know something that's not documented, I just mail them and they'll respond usually by the next working day. * Very stable Java support (although the API could be better), let's me use the entire Java ecosystem of libraries when I need it. * The platform itself is rock-solid. Now SBCL is fantastic, but when I ran my servers on SBCL, I would have a crash every now and then. With LW, I can have my server running weeks (current uptime is a month) with reloading code multiple times a day, and everything is still super stable. There's more, but I think the rest is more negotiable. For instance, the FLI is a lot more polished than using CFFI, which makes a huge difference in productivity when writing native code. Or the fact that its remote-debugger facility can be used as a very stable protocol to programmatically control a remote LW process. I don't use the IDE btw, so I'm not even considering that. I don't use CAPI either, but I mean to someday. 2023, Arnold @tdrhq of Screenshotbot (https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss https://github.com/screenshotbot/screenshotbot-oss) on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/common_lisp_implementations_in_2023/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/11979q4/common... [/cite]

aidenn0 4y ago

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mikedelago 4y ago

I had a great time writing common lisp for the better part of 2022, including doing about half of Advent of Code in it. It's such an awesome language and once you get an understanding of macros, it really does feel powerful. Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a wall. I don't really have any personal projects to work with CL, and if I used CL (or any lisp/scheme dialect for that matter) at work I'd be in trouble. Nice to have in the back pocket though, and I'm excited to reach for it in the future.

matrix12 4y ago

Franz releases updates continuously bringing in new features. The update.sh handles these patches, and new items.

hvs 4y ago

For a period much earlier in my career (think early 00's) I seriously desired to work in Common Lisp professionally. Through a series of life decisions and other opportunities, that never really happened. But I continued to work on Lisp projects on my own and use it for various things. I don't consider it a "superpower," and I don't think it makes me 10x more productive or anything like that. Most modern languages have stolen most of the thunder from Lisp (other than macros) so I would be hard-pressed to recommend it for greenfield development. That said, I love working in it. I don't have any illusions that it will make a "comeback" or that I will ever make money writing it (I long ago switched to looking for job opportunities based on the problem domain rather than the toolset), but I continue to use it personally because it makes me happier than any other language.

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orthecreedence 4y ago

Sad to see Clozure CL abandoned, that was my main squeeze back in my lisp days (I was on Windows and SBCL wasn't cut out for it at the time). How's SBCL on Windows these days?

kazinator 4y ago
CCL is not "abandoned". I recently brushed the dust off an application that I last released in 2014. It uses CCL on Windows. I was pleased to see there is a recent new version from 2021. I upgraded to that and did some new work, making new releases.
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  Well, that's good, but the article made it sound like it was no more. Maybe it's just that it's feature-complete.
  - lispm 4y ago
    There are bugs which have not been fixed, maybe they are - who knows. For example on ARM processor it dies in multiprocessing. Next: CCL comes originally from the Mac platform (the original Coral Lisp started on the early Mac, Apple even owned Macintosh Common Lisp for a few years, that code was used to create OpenMCL, aka Clozure CL) and there is still no Apple Silicon port and there is no real progress to get there.

kazinator 4y ago

CLISP is excellent for learning Common Lisp; it has a readline-based REPL with editing and tab completion, so you don't need anything other than the CLISP installation. The licensing server back end for the Tankan kanji learning application runs on CLISP.

noloblo 4y ago

if sbcl significantly faster than racket why and when do practitioners use racket?

_ph_ 4y ago
What do you mean by that? A lot of people use racket, a lot of people use SBCL, which is indeed significantly faster. They are actually completely different software for different purposes and very different strengths.
- noloblo 4y ago
  what are strengths of sbcl over racket? what are strengths of racket over sbcl? if sbcl raw speed > racket speed wouldn't most expert lispers by default choose sbcl? what purposes does racket uniquely serve not served by sbcl?
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    > what are strengths of sbcl over racket? SBCL is a Common Lisp implementation, racket implements variants of Scheme. SBCL is natively compiled, creates standalone executables. > what are strengths of racket over sbcl? It implements various scheme dialects, the ability to integrate different languages in one image is unique. It offers an integrated enviroment with a lot of libraries included, that is why it is popular in academia. > if sbcl raw speed > racket speed wouldn't most expert lispers by default choose sbcl? First of all, they implement different programming languages, that means they are not competing directly with each other and are very different beasts as discribed above. Racket seems to be very popular in academia, while SBCL is more used for practical software development. At least that is the impression I have. > what purposes does racket uniquely serve not served by sbcl? I think I have answered that above.
    - lispm 4y ago
      > the ability to integrate different languages in one image is unique Somehow. It should be possible to load a C, Prolog and Python implementations into one sbcl image. The Symbolics Lisp Machine emulator I use comes with C, Pascal, Fortran, several Common Lisp variants, Lisp Machine Lisp in one image. Kalman Reti once gave a demo how to debug mixed Lisp and C code in a REPL on such a Lisp Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

chris_armstrong 4y ago

Compared to languages that have a single implementation, have multiple commercial and open source implementations in reasonable states of continuous development seems like a good place to be.