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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 busin

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".
  - oblio 4y ago
    > That's a much more nuanced way to put it - compared to "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone". Where does he say that?
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      https://www.n16f.net/blog/common-lisp-implementations-in-2023/#lispworks https://www.n16f.net/blog/common-lisp-implementations-in-202...
      - oblio 4y ago
        I've read it and if you're referring to this: > I do not have anything personal against commercial software, and I strongly support developers being paid for their work. But this kind of licensing makes Lispworks irrelevant to everyone but those already using their proprietary libraries. is he wrong? Go ask 100 random devs working for various companies. My money's on 99% on them avoiding those licensing terms in favor of probably anything else.
        kgwgk 4y ago
        In case it was not clear I was referring to this literal quote from the linked article: "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone" which does indeed convey a more negative tone than this literal quote from the comment that I replied to: "the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start"
        oblio 4y ago
        Ah, I was looking at the wrong quote. However, I think techies are too nitpicky. In casual use "everyone" or "anyone" do not mean: "I literally asked everyone on the surface of the planet". And he's not wrong. Unless you have a preexisting commitment to Lisp and ecosystem or your needs are so specific that you need this precise piece of software, you won't use it.
- anta40 4y ago
  I assume you have some specific needs that couldn't be handled by open source Lisps like SBCL, CCL, etc?
  - oblio 4y ago
    No, his needs are probably better handled by Java or .NET or Go or whatever. And that's how Lisp atrophies. The complaint is a valid one.
    - varjag 4y ago
      Enterprise Java licenses are charged per developer seat, just saying.
      - lispm 4y ago
        Hasn't this just recently changed to per employee? https://www.infoworld.com/article/3686611/oracle-per-employee-java-pricing-causes-concern.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3686611/oracle-per-employe...
        hajile 4y ago
        $15/mo or $180/yr. Lispworks for that same platform support would cost about $20,000 per dev the first year then a few thousand every year after. You could buy 100 years of enterprise Java support for Jay one year of Lispworks.
        lispm 4y ago
        The Java license costs per employee. Not per developer. That's an entirely different business model in a very different market for a very different tool. It's a bit like claiming that your AMG Mercedes has a different pricing than a corporate car of a large fleet managed by a large rental company. That's trivially true, but you are comparing very different things.
      - oblio 4y ago
- lispm 4y ago
  > Open sourcing Lispworks and selling support contracts and an enterprise version (with CAPI, CORBA, etc.) would make more sense. I don't think it makes any sense, since the market for such complex Lisp systems is tiny. It would not generate a reliable revenue stream for such a niche technology. It's not that it has not been tried in the past, but all Lisp vendors from the past, and there were a dozen or more with different license models / pricing, have gone. Left are Franz and LispWorks. Both are 30+ years in business.
  - hajile 4y ago
    They know their locked-in customers, but they also know they don’t get many additional customers at those prices either.
    - lispm 4y ago
      The market is small anyway. Better have customers at all. Mabe the customers are not "locked in", but happy that there are remaining offerings. See the pricing for commercial Smalltalk. Same thing.
- matrix12 4y ago
  The linux lispworks runs fine for me on Freebsd with linux_compat.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  You wrote of LispWorks: “ The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone” Perhaps a question I would ask is what are you trying to convey with this statement? It appears to be quite subjective.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    You quote him saying "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone" your quote is the definition of "out of context", you left out his colon leading to the rest of his sentence where he explains what he means, i.e. what you are asking. "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone: you will have to buy separate licenses for every..." ...now, I'm not quoting the rest of it because while it's easy to engage with a substantive argument, you didn't say anything. Still your move.
    - kjs3 4y ago
      Since you're going to be a condescending pendant...everything after the colon is why it doesn't make sense for him, not why it doesn't make sense for anyone, and it's very clear that's the point he's making. It's a common fallacy around here: "I think this, therefore it's applicable to everyone".
      - inimino 4y ago
        *pedant. ;-)
        kjs3 4y ago
        Ouch. And thus, all my sophistry is discredited. ;-)
lelanthran 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. What? I found it informative - clear and to the point about what frustrations you can expect with the licenses. I mean, FCOL, he even made the effort to search google for the cost of the licenses because Franz hides them. What exactly in the following texts do you describe as "strong anti-commercial comments"? ------------------------------------------------------ > Moving to proprietary implementations; Lispworks has been around for more than 30 years and the company producing it still release new versions on a regular basis. > While Lispworks supports most features you would expect from a commercial product (native compiler, multithreading, FFI, GUI library, various graphical tools, a Prolog implementation…), it is hampered by its licensing system. > 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. The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone: you will have to buy separate licenses for every single platform at more than a thousand euros per license (with the enterprise version being 2-3 times more expensive). Of course you will have to buy a maintenance contract on a yearly basis… but it does not include technical support. It will have to be bought with “incident packs” costing thousands of euros; because yes, paying for a product and a maintenance contract does not mean they will fix bugs, and you will have to pay for each of them. ----------------------------------- Releases are uncommon, the last one being almost 6 years ago. But Allegro is a mature implementation packed with features not easily replicated such as AllegroCache, AllegroServe, libraries for multiple protocols and data formats, analysis tools, a concurrent garbage collector and even an OpenGL interface. Allegro suffers the same issue as Lispworks: the enterprise-style pricing system is incredibly frustrating. The website advertises a hefty $599 starting price (which at least includes technical support), but there is no mention of what it contains. Interested developpers will have to contact Franz Inc. to get other prices. A quick Google search will reveal rumours of enterprise versions priced above 8000 dollars. No comment.
- varjag 4y ago
  > It will have to be bought with “incident packs” costing thousands of euros; because yes, paying for a product and a maintenance contract does not mean they will fix bugs, and you will have to pay for each of them. This is something the author made up on the spot. They will most definitely fix the bugs regardless if you have support contract.
oblio 4y ago
He's right, though. If I'm a somewhat polyglot developer ambivalent to any language out there, why would I pay those licensing costs when I can just go elsewhere instead? That's what regular devs do, they don't even bother writing articles or commenting on HN :-)
- jgerrish 4y ago
  > That's what regular devs do, they don't even bother writing articles or commenting on HN :-) I'll take the bait, and roll up several of my comments into one. First, the support contract costs from the commercial vendors can make sense. It's one of the most expensive parts of software. We joke about fixing relatives' printers, but it's not false. Support costs introduce a counter-balance. Second, a message to everyone looking into or using QuickLisp, it uses http instead of https: https://github.com/quicklisp/quicklisp-client/issues/167 https://github.com/quicklisp/quicklisp-client/issues/167 You can patch your version to fix this. I'd also recommend adding firewall rules to deny in case your patches roll back. And any other mitigation. Or stricter policies, such as not using it, if it makes sense for your organization. And the AI bots? I hope there aren't people herding them who don't want to, that's how you get unloving brats and a crappy world.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    Is support costs for a language actually worth it? I've used Python professionally for about 10 years now and never hit an actual python runtime bug or needed to contact the PSF for support. A language vendor telling me about the faith I should have in their support sounds like I shouldn't have faith in the language. I've never learned a lisp because every runtime and tooling set up seems 20 years behind modern. I'd be interested in learning with a good lisp variant, but not if I have to pay. It's like how Adobe doesn't really do anything major to prevent piracy. And because of that hobbyists learn their tools and then companies have to pay for those tools because it's the dominant tool in that industry.
    - taeric 4y ago
      Support at this level can also include help making something perform well. Or help understanding bugs in your code. That is, it isn't just a "prove we are at fault and we will fix it thing" which plagues a lot of moderate sized projects online.
ducktective 4y ago
> Small standalone executables with a tree shaker How small? Are they static and hassle-free like Go/Rust binaries? > you can also make small standalone apps with SBCL Same question. Also what's the downside? Slower run-time?
- vindarel 4y ago
  With SBCL, the bare-bones image would be ±100MB, with core compression (a single flag to set in the .asd file) I get apps at ±25MB. The startup time of the latter is ±0.30s, the bigger executable is faster. My app would be a web app, with the webserver, templates, and many libraries. This binary also contains the Lisp debugger and compiler, which is useful to interact with it when it's running. In a latest version, SBCL switched to compression with zstd, which makes the compression process 4 times faster, decompression around 2 times, and it saves around +10% more space. On reddit (link below), a user speaks about LispWorks binaries of ±9MB.
  - mark_l_watson 4y ago
    Yes, compressed SBCL images load so fast that a few years ago I had a command line tool that I wrote using a compressed image. I think the load time for the tool was perhaps 100 milliseconds.
_ph_ 4y ago
I am convinced that Lispworks is a great product. From what I can see it comes with a nice IDE and some nice libraries. I would have loved to give it a try, but unfortunately I was never able to do do so. And that is where the critique of the licensing scheme comes from. I am sure there are quite a few professionals for whom Lispworks has great value and the license costs are just a non-issue. But despite being a professional Lisp programmer for more than 15 years, I never came close to licensing Lispworks. Nor in the 20 years of being a Lisp enthusiast. As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. I would like to be able to really evaluate the product before spending a significant amount of money on it, but with the limits of the personal edition, it immediately quit on the first attempt of starting my back-then tiny hobby project. Don't get me wrong, a company has the right to select the business model which fits them best and I might not be their intended audience. But that is why I never bought from them and as I never used the product didn't really put under strong consideration when choosing a Lisp implementation for commercial work. On the other side, with SBCL I have a really strong Lisp implementation. The compiler is likely to produce better code and it is readily available. Slime might lack the fanciness of a standalone IDE, but as a longtime Emacs user, that might actually be an advantage.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. Note that the cost for private usage starts at a few hundred €. You only get to "thousands" if you include multiple platforms or several support incidents.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    Well, it starts at €480 (Linux) - €720 for the Mac for a pure IDE, without the ability to produce executables. You are limited to run your programs inside the development environment, this limits its applicability a lot. You can't write a simple command line utility this way, just to name one example. You cannot give it to a friend etc. The HobbyistDV edition is in my eyes the first really usable one. It is already over €1400, and that is for a single OS, a single CPU architecture. Especially as a hobbyist I might be able to play around with it a bit. I would be interested if there is any customer who has more than one hobbyistDV license. And that doesn't seem to include any updates.
brudgers 4y ago
Looking at the price of the “Hobbyist DV” version, it is not out of line with what people often spend on hobbies like photography, music, and cycling. Or just on beer and/or wine. Or books. Not to say people don’t spend less on their hobbies, just that a license is a less than a Sony A7R3 or a used Les Paul.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Yes, if a hobbyist absolutely wants to buy a Lispworks license, that should be possible for many people. But that isn't the only criterium. The question is: is anyone as happy to pay the price compared to spend the money on other things, like buying a camera or lens. There is some perception of value involved. For example I do spend a lot of money on my camera equipment and some people are suprised by it, though I spend way less on my car than they do. But on the other side, many people can't spend so much on any hobby or car. On the other side there is SBCL. This is really a great Lisp implementation, in some ways clearly superior even, this limits the amount what at least I am willing to pay for some fancyness of the commercial edition. As far as I can see, I struggle to preceive a critical advantage for Lispworks. And the price is way above the impulse by territory.
  - TurboHaskal 4y ago
    > I struggle to preceive a critical advantage for Lispworks. CAPI is the reason. If you want to develop a professional GUI application and you want to use Common Lisp, LW is pretty much the only option.
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      Depends on what exactly you mean by professional. There are Gtk and Qt bindings for SBCL (haven't tried them), and I have deployed GUI applications in an professional environment based on LTk. Yes, CAPI is certainly a strong point of Lispworks and in a commercial environment, the costs are not necessarily a problem, but I was making the statement in the context of the Hobbyist versions.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
jlarocco 4y ago
Yeah, I totally agree. I only use Lisp as a hobby so I stick to the free implementations, but if I made money with it I definitely wouldn't mind paying for LispWorks or Allegro. An $8k license fee really isn't that much for enterprise software.
- Jach 4y ago
  Haha, if only it was $8k one-and-done, but if you're using it for more than just the IDE but also delivering binaries with it, hope you like paying runtime license fees depending on how your application is used: https://franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml https://franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml Yes, there are times this makes sense to pay anyway (it's still not uncommon for game engines for example), but it's a lot to ask for outside of those times especially given the competition.
  - lispm 4y ago
    Also processor licenses, library costs for devs, etc. I recently stumbled over a Java domain specific development system (for insurance), where the dev seat did cost 100k euros. Franz and LispWorks has different licensing models for companies. Franz is going the route of per usage/value and LispWorks has no extra cost for delivery (without the dev environment). These licensing models are specific for tools in small niches. You'll see similar models for example for commercial Smalltalk systems.
Jach 4y ago
Heh, if you thought this post had very strong comments about LispWorks and Franz, wait till you read my rant from last year: https://www.thejach.com/view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_lisp#3 https://www.thejach.com/view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_... It doesn't bother me as much as maybe it seems from the rant, I don't think about them hardly at all. But when I do, it's frustrating, because just about every other ecosystem out there is better. The rant highlights IntelliJ from the Java world as an alternative. Somehow, JetBrains is able to cater to individual developers and incredibly giant enterprises just fine. They care about their IDE and associated software. LispWorks and Franz do not, to the same degree. That's fine, it's their businesses, but it's disappointing when you want to see Lisp succeed and you have two great proprietary IDEs and implementations that are effectively untouchable for a huge portion of Lispers and would-be-Lispers.
- lispm 4y ago
  Keep in mind that IntelliJ was developed for a market which is three or four orders of magnitude larger: devs, investments, etc. That is an entirely different business model then. Compare for example commercial Smalltalk (VisualWorks, ObjectStudio Enterprise, Gemstone, VA Smalltalk ...): https://gemtalksystems.com/licensing/ https://gemtalksystems.com/licensing/ https://www.instantiations.com/vast-platform/pricing/ https://www.instantiations.com/vast-platform/pricing/
butternoodle 4y ago
SBCL's save-lisp-and-die is my all time favourite function name. It's so unintentionally melodramatic :)

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".
- oblio 4y ago
  > That's a much more nuanced way to put it - compared to "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone". Where does he say that?
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    https://www.n16f.net/blog/common-lisp-implementations-in-2023/#lispworks https://www.n16f.net/blog/common-lisp-implementations-in-202...
    - oblio 4y ago
      I've read it and if you're referring to this: > I do not have anything personal against commercial software, and I strongly support developers being paid for their work. But this kind of licensing makes Lispworks irrelevant to everyone but those already using their proprietary libraries. is he wrong? Go ask 100 random devs working for various companies. My money's on 99% on them avoiding those licensing terms in favor of probably anything else.
      - kgwgk 4y ago
        In case it was not clear I was referring to this literal quote from the linked article: "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone" which does indeed convey a more negative tone than this literal quote from the comment that I replied to: "the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start"
        oblio 4y ago
        Ah, I was looking at the wrong quote. However, I think techies are too nitpicky. In casual use "everyone" or "anyone" do not mean: "I literally asked everyone on the surface of the planet". And he's not wrong. Unless you have a preexisting commitment to Lisp and ecosystem or your needs are so specific that you need this precise piece of software, you won't use it.
anta40 4y ago
I assume you have some specific needs that couldn't be handled by open source Lisps like SBCL, CCL, etc?
- oblio 4y ago
  No, his needs are probably better handled by Java or .NET or Go or whatever. And that's how Lisp atrophies. The complaint is a valid one.
  - varjag 4y ago
    Enterprise Java licenses are charged per developer seat, just saying.
    - lispm 4y ago
      Hasn't this just recently changed to per employee? https://www.infoworld.com/article/3686611/oracle-per-employee-java-pricing-causes-concern.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3686611/oracle-per-employe...
      - hajile 4y ago
        $15/mo or $180/yr. Lispworks for that same platform support would cost about $20,000 per dev the first year then a few thousand every year after. You could buy 100 years of enterprise Java support for Jay one year of Lispworks.
        lispm 4y ago
        The Java license costs per employee. Not per developer. That's an entirely different business model in a very different market for a very different tool. It's a bit like claiming that your AMG Mercedes has a different pricing than a corporate car of a large fleet managed by a large rental company. That's trivially true, but you are comparing very different things.
    - oblio 4y ago
lispm 4y ago
> Open sourcing Lispworks and selling support contracts and an enterprise version (with CAPI, CORBA, etc.) would make more sense. I don't think it makes any sense, since the market for such complex Lisp systems is tiny. It would not generate a reliable revenue stream for such a niche technology. It's not that it has not been tried in the past, but all Lisp vendors from the past, and there were a dozen or more with different license models / pricing, have gone. Left are Franz and LispWorks. Both are 30+ years in business.
- hajile 4y ago
  They know their locked-in customers, but they also know they don’t get many additional customers at those prices either.
  - lispm 4y ago
    The market is small anyway. Better have customers at all. Mabe the customers are not "locked in", but happy that there are remaining offerings. See the pricing for commercial Smalltalk. Same thing.
matrix12 4y ago
The linux lispworks runs fine for me on Freebsd with linux_compat.
andsoitis 4y ago
You wrote of LispWorks: “ The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone” Perhaps a question I would ask is what are you trying to convey with this statement? It appears to be quite subjective.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  You quote him saying "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone" your quote is the definition of "out of context", you left out his colon leading to the rest of his sentence where he explains what he means, i.e. what you are asking. "The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone: you will have to buy separate licenses for every..." ...now, I'm not quoting the rest of it because while it's easy to engage with a substantive argument, you didn't say anything. Still your move.
  - kjs3 4y ago
    Since you're going to be a condescending pendant...everything after the colon is why it doesn't make sense for him, not why it doesn't make sense for anyone, and it's very clear that's the point he's making. It's a common fallacy around here: "I think this, therefore it's applicable to everyone".
    - inimino 4y ago
      *pedant. ;-)
      - kjs3 4y ago
        Ouch. And thus, all my sophistry is discredited. ;-)

lelanthran 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. What? I found it informative - clear and to the point about what frustrations you can expect with the licenses. I mean, FCOL, he even made the effort to search google for the cost of the licenses because Franz hides them. What exactly in the following texts do you describe as "strong anti-commercial comments"? ------------------------------------------------------ > Moving to proprietary implementations; Lispworks has been around for more than 30 years and the company producing it still release new versions on a regular basis. > While Lispworks supports most features you would expect from a commercial product (native compiler, multithreading, FFI, GUI library, various graphical tools, a Prolog implementation…), it is hampered by its licensing system. > 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. The professional and enterprise licenses do not really make sense for anyone: you will have to buy separate licenses for every single platform at more than a thousand euros per license (with the enterprise version being 2-3 times more expensive). Of course you will have to buy a maintenance contract on a yearly basis… but it does not include technical support. It will have to be bought with “incident packs” costing thousands of euros; because yes, paying for a product and a maintenance contract does not mean they will fix bugs, and you will have to pay for each of them. ----------------------------------- Releases are uncommon, the last one being almost 6 years ago. But Allegro is a mature implementation packed with features not easily replicated such as AllegroCache, AllegroServe, libraries for multiple protocols and data formats, analysis tools, a concurrent garbage collector and even an OpenGL interface. Allegro suffers the same issue as Lispworks: the enterprise-style pricing system is incredibly frustrating. The website advertises a hefty $599 starting price (which at least includes technical support), but there is no mention of what it contains. Interested developpers will have to contact Franz Inc. to get other prices. A quick Google search will reveal rumours of enterprise versions priced above 8000 dollars. No comment.

varjag 4y ago
> It will have to be bought with “incident packs” costing thousands of euros; because yes, paying for a product and a maintenance contract does not mean they will fix bugs, and you will have to pay for each of them. This is something the author made up on the spot. They will most definitely fix the bugs regardless if you have support contract.

oblio 4y ago

He's right, though. If I'm a somewhat polyglot developer ambivalent to any language out there, why would I pay those licensing costs when I can just go elsewhere instead? That's what regular devs do, they don't even bother writing articles or commenting on HN :-)

jgerrish 4y ago
> That's what regular devs do, they don't even bother writing articles or commenting on HN :-) I'll take the bait, and roll up several of my comments into one. First, the support contract costs from the commercial vendors can make sense. It's one of the most expensive parts of software. We joke about fixing relatives' printers, but it's not false. Support costs introduce a counter-balance. Second, a message to everyone looking into or using QuickLisp, it uses http instead of https: https://github.com/quicklisp/quicklisp-client/issues/167 https://github.com/quicklisp/quicklisp-client/issues/167 You can patch your version to fix this. I'd also recommend adding firewall rules to deny in case your patches roll back. And any other mitigation. Or stricter policies, such as not using it, if it makes sense for your organization. And the AI bots? I hope there aren't people herding them who don't want to, that's how you get unloving brats and a crappy world.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  Is support costs for a language actually worth it? I've used Python professionally for about 10 years now and never hit an actual python runtime bug or needed to contact the PSF for support. A language vendor telling me about the faith I should have in their support sounds like I shouldn't have faith in the language. I've never learned a lisp because every runtime and tooling set up seems 20 years behind modern. I'd be interested in learning with a good lisp variant, but not if I have to pay. It's like how Adobe doesn't really do anything major to prevent piracy. And because of that hobbyists learn their tools and then companies have to pay for those tools because it's the dominant tool in that industry.
  - taeric 4y ago
    Support at this level can also include help making something perform well. Or help understanding bugs in your code. That is, it isn't just a "prove we are at fault and we will fix it thing" which plagues a lot of moderate sized projects online.

ducktective 4y ago

> Small standalone executables with a tree shaker How small? Are they static and hassle-free like Go/Rust binaries? > you can also make small standalone apps with SBCL Same question. Also what's the downside? Slower run-time?

vindarel 4y ago
With SBCL, the bare-bones image would be ±100MB, with core compression (a single flag to set in the .asd file) I get apps at ±25MB. The startup time of the latter is ±0.30s, the bigger executable is faster. My app would be a web app, with the webserver, templates, and many libraries. This binary also contains the Lisp debugger and compiler, which is useful to interact with it when it's running. In a latest version, SBCL switched to compression with zstd, which makes the compression process 4 times faster, decompression around 2 times, and it saves around +10% more space. On reddit (link below), a user speaks about LispWorks binaries of ±9MB.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Yes, compressed SBCL images load so fast that a few years ago I had a command line tool that I wrote using a compressed image. I think the load time for the tool was perhaps 100 milliseconds.

_ph_ 4y ago

I am convinced that Lispworks is a great product. From what I can see it comes with a nice IDE and some nice libraries. I would have loved to give it a try, but unfortunately I was never able to do do so. And that is where the critique of the licensing scheme comes from. I am sure there are quite a few professionals for whom Lispworks has great value and the license costs are just a non-issue. But despite being a professional Lisp programmer for more than 15 years, I never came close to licensing Lispworks. Nor in the 20 years of being a Lisp enthusiast. As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. I would like to be able to really evaluate the product before spending a significant amount of money on it, but with the limits of the personal edition, it immediately quit on the first attempt of starting my back-then tiny hobby project. Don't get me wrong, a company has the right to select the business model which fits them best and I might not be their intended audience. But that is why I never bought from them and as I never used the product didn't really put under strong consideration when choosing a Lisp implementation for commercial work. On the other side, with SBCL I have a really strong Lisp implementation. The compiler is likely to produce better code and it is readily available. Slime might lack the fanciness of a standalone IDE, but as a longtime Emacs user, that might actually be an advantage.

kgwgk 4y ago
> As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. Note that the cost for private usage starts at a few hundred €. You only get to "thousands" if you include multiple platforms or several support incidents.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  Well, it starts at €480 (Linux) - €720 for the Mac for a pure IDE, without the ability to produce executables. You are limited to run your programs inside the development environment, this limits its applicability a lot. You can't write a simple command line utility this way, just to name one example. You cannot give it to a friend etc. The HobbyistDV edition is in my eyes the first really usable one. It is already over €1400, and that is for a single OS, a single CPU architecture. Especially as a hobbyist I might be able to play around with it a bit. I would be interested if there is any customer who has more than one hobbyistDV license. And that doesn't seem to include any updates.

brudgers 4y ago

Looking at the price of the “Hobbyist DV” version, it is not out of line with what people often spend on hobbies like photography, music, and cycling. Or just on beer and/or wine. Or books. Not to say people don’t spend less on their hobbies, just that a license is a less than a Sony A7R3 or a used Les Paul.

_ph_ 4y ago
Yes, if a hobbyist absolutely wants to buy a Lispworks license, that should be possible for many people. But that isn't the only criterium. The question is: is anyone as happy to pay the price compared to spend the money on other things, like buying a camera or lens. There is some perception of value involved. For example I do spend a lot of money on my camera equipment and some people are suprised by it, though I spend way less on my car than they do. But on the other side, many people can't spend so much on any hobby or car. On the other side there is SBCL. This is really a great Lisp implementation, in some ways clearly superior even, this limits the amount what at least I am willing to pay for some fancyness of the commercial edition. As far as I can see, I struggle to preceive a critical advantage for Lispworks. And the price is way above the impulse by territory.
- TurboHaskal 4y ago
  > I struggle to preceive a critical advantage for Lispworks. CAPI is the reason. If you want to develop a professional GUI application and you want to use Common Lisp, LW is pretty much the only option.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    Depends on what exactly you mean by professional. There are Gtk and Qt bindings for SBCL (haven't tried them), and I have deployed GUI applications in an professional environment based on LTk. Yes, CAPI is certainly a strong point of Lispworks and in a commercial environment, the costs are not necessarily a problem, but I was making the statement in the context of the Hobbyist versions.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jlarocco 4y ago

Yeah, I totally agree. I only use Lisp as a hobby so I stick to the free implementations, but if I made money with it I definitely wouldn't mind paying for LispWorks or Allegro. An $8k license fee really isn't that much for enterprise software.

Jach 4y ago
Haha, if only it was $8k one-and-done, but if you're using it for more than just the IDE but also delivering binaries with it, hope you like paying runtime license fees depending on how your application is used: https://franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml https://franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml Yes, there are times this makes sense to pay anyway (it's still not uncommon for game engines for example), but it's a lot to ask for outside of those times especially given the competition.
- lispm 4y ago
  Also processor licenses, library costs for devs, etc. I recently stumbled over a Java domain specific development system (for insurance), where the dev seat did cost 100k euros. Franz and LispWorks has different licensing models for companies. Franz is going the route of per usage/value and LispWorks has no extra cost for delivery (without the dev environment). These licensing models are specific for tools in small niches. You'll see similar models for example for commercial Smalltalk systems.

Jach 4y ago

Heh, if you thought this post had very strong comments about LispWorks and Franz, wait till you read my rant from last year: https://www.thejach.com/view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_lisp#3 https://www.thejach.com/view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_... It doesn't bother me as much as maybe it seems from the rant, I don't think about them hardly at all. But when I do, it's frustrating, because just about every other ecosystem out there is better. The rant highlights IntelliJ from the Java world as an alternative. Somehow, JetBrains is able to cater to individual developers and incredibly giant enterprises just fine. They care about their IDE and associated software. LispWorks and Franz do not, to the same degree. That's fine, it's their businesses, but it's disappointing when you want to see Lisp succeed and you have two great proprietary IDEs and implementations that are effectively untouchable for a huge portion of Lispers and would-be-Lispers.

lispm 4y ago
Keep in mind that IntelliJ was developed for a market which is three or four orders of magnitude larger: devs, investments, etc. That is an entirely different business model then. Compare for example commercial Smalltalk (VisualWorks, ObjectStudio Enterprise, Gemstone, VA Smalltalk ...): https://gemtalksystems.com/licensing/ https://gemtalksystems.com/licensing/ https://www.instantiations.com/vast-platform/pricing/ https://www.instantiations.com/vast-platform/pricing/

butternoodle 4y ago

SBCL's save-lisp-and-die is my all time favourite function name. It's so unintentionally melodramatic :)