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It doesn't give you good tools for networking, for writing concurrent or asynchronous code, for graphics, it doesn't give you a good package manager or means of

It doesn't give you good tools for networking, for writing concurrent or asynchronous code, for graphics, it doesn't give you a good package manager or means of distributing code, its data structures are unwieldy, it takes work to make it performant, etc. The obstacles add up, and the time you spend on these issues by dealing with hopefully supported community libraries or rolling your own is time spent not dealing with the real problem you're trying to solve. Racket and Clojure are better suited for pragmatic use in my opinion/experience.

jll29 3y ago
Perhaps you can get some of the advantages that you cite as missing by using an embedded LISP or Scheme implemented in Rust, so you can piggy-back on Rust's nice ecosystem and still have a dynamic "LISP sub-system". For instance: https://github.com/isamert/scheme.rs https://github.com/isamert/scheme.rs (a Scheme in 3853 lines of Rust)
- kitd 3y ago
  That's really what Clojure is, except based on the JVM, with access to the Java stdlib.
vindarel 3y ago
> obstacles add up I actually agree. It wasn't smooth for me to ship my first CL app. It's all better now (more tools, more documentation, more blog posts from several people, more SO questions and answers!). > performant SBCL is in the same ballpack of C, Rust or Java in many benchmarks. In this article series, the author writes the same program in CL, Rust and Java. In fact, he copy-pastes a PG snippet from 30 years ago. This snippet beats Rust and Java in LOC and speed. But, yeah, he wasn't writing super efficient Rust code, so after many discussions, pull requests and sweating, the Rust code became the most performant. https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-comparing-languages.html https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... It didn't take work to make the CL code performant, more so for the Rust one ;) a benchmark after sb-simd vectorization: https://preview.redd.it/vn5juu36v2681.png?width=715&format=png&auto=webp&s=266dde2daf33c6767531fa635d436ac9657d63c8 https://preview.redd.it/vn5juu36v2681.png?width=715&format=p... (https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/riedio/quite_amazing_sbcl_benchmark_speed_with_sbsimd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/riedio/quite_a...) > good tools for networking, for writing concurrent or asynchronous code, for graphics, I refer the reader to https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl but yes, CL won't have the best libraries in some scenarii (GUI? Tk libs are good, we have Gtk4, a Qt5 library used in production© by a big player but difficult to install etc) > it doesn't give you a good package manager or means of distributing code Quicklisp is neat, with limitations, that can be addressed with Qlot, ql-https, or CLPM or the newest ocicl.
- the-alchemist 3y ago
  These types of comparisons aren't "fair". As in most fields of engineering, programming languages/databases/etc. are about tradeoffs, and benchmarks aren't even more tricky. From the blog: > If you don’t have time: Rust can run much faster, but so can the other languages, and it turns out that the Java implementation might run faster than the Rust fastest implementation, according to the new benchmarks I’ve run after many Rust developers came to assist in making Rust faster. Common Lisp may have fallen behind, but that’s likely just because it was not nearly as optimized as the Java and Rust implementations were. The reason PHP, Ruby, Python, bash, etc. are popular are because of developer productivity, not performance. Also, it's a false dichotomy. Java uses `zlib` for its GZIP*Streams for performance reasons, and if there was a nice Rust library I wanted to use, I would just build a shared library and call it from Java, just like Java internally uses for `zlib`. Additionally, there's a fairly large difference in performance between C compilers. See clang, gcc, icc, etc., and the 100+ different options you can use when compiling something. It's not even close to "apples vs oranges", it's like more "apples vs fire trucks". :-P
- vindarel 3y ago
  Here's the follow-up with an optimized CL version: https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revenge_of_lisp-part-2.html https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revenge_of_lisp-part-2.htm... See the conclusion: - the CL version is the fastest of ALL… in certain conditions ;)
lsp_trw 3y ago
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amon22 3y ago
> obstacles add up well put, this is my experience as well. Still an awesome language so I did not mind learning it but I had better luck using clojure for my projects. Especially for web stuff Clojure is just excellent. It also doesn't hurt that you can actually get a job coding Clojure if you're experienced (or so I hear)

jll29 3y ago

Perhaps you can get some of the advantages that you cite as missing by using an embedded LISP or Scheme implemented in Rust, so you can piggy-back on Rust's nice ecosystem and still have a dynamic "LISP sub-system". For instance: https://github.com/isamert/scheme.rs https://github.com/isamert/scheme.rs (a Scheme in 3853 lines of Rust)

kitd 3y ago
That's really what Clojure is, except based on the JVM, with access to the Java stdlib.

vindarel 3y ago

> obstacles add up I actually agree. It wasn't smooth for me to ship my first CL app. It's all better now (more tools, more documentation, more blog posts from several people, more SO questions and answers!). > performant SBCL is in the same ballpack of C, Rust or Java in many benchmarks. In this article series, the author writes the same program in CL, Rust and Java. In fact, he copy-pastes a PG snippet from 30 years ago. This snippet beats Rust and Java in LOC and speed. But, yeah, he wasn't writing super efficient Rust code, so after many discussions, pull requests and sweating, the Rust code became the most performant. https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-comparing-languages.html https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... It didn't take work to make the CL code performant, more so for the Rust one ;) a benchmark after sb-simd vectorization: https://preview.redd.it/vn5juu36v2681.png?width=715&format=png&auto=webp&s=266dde2daf33c6767531fa635d436ac9657d63c8 https://preview.redd.it/vn5juu36v2681.png?width=715&format=p... (https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/riedio/quite_amazing_sbcl_benchmark_speed_with_sbsimd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/riedio/quite_a...) > good tools for networking, for writing concurrent or asynchronous code, for graphics, I refer the reader to https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl but yes, CL won't have the best libraries in some scenarii (GUI? Tk libs are good, we have Gtk4, a Qt5 library used in production© by a big player but difficult to install etc) > it doesn't give you a good package manager or means of distributing code Quicklisp is neat, with limitations, that can be addressed with Qlot, ql-https, or CLPM or the newest ocicl.

the-alchemist 3y ago
These types of comparisons aren't "fair". As in most fields of engineering, programming languages/databases/etc. are about tradeoffs, and benchmarks aren't even more tricky. From the blog: > If you don’t have time: Rust can run much faster, but so can the other languages, and it turns out that the Java implementation might run faster than the Rust fastest implementation, according to the new benchmarks I’ve run after many Rust developers came to assist in making Rust faster. Common Lisp may have fallen behind, but that’s likely just because it was not nearly as optimized as the Java and Rust implementations were. The reason PHP, Ruby, Python, bash, etc. are popular are because of developer productivity, not performance. Also, it's a false dichotomy. Java uses `zlib` for its GZIP*Streams for performance reasons, and if there was a nice Rust library I wanted to use, I would just build a shared library and call it from Java, just like Java internally uses for `zlib`. Additionally, there's a fairly large difference in performance between C compilers. See clang, gcc, icc, etc., and the 100+ different options you can use when compiling something. It's not even close to "apples vs oranges", it's like more "apples vs fire trucks". :-P
vindarel 3y ago
Here's the follow-up with an optimized CL version: https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revenge_of_lisp-part-2.html https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revenge_of_lisp-part-2.htm... See the conclusion: - the CL version is the fastest of ALL… in certain conditions ;)

lsp_trw 3y ago

[dead]

amon22 3y ago

> obstacles add up well put, this is my experience as well. Still an awesome language so I did not mind learning it but I had better luck using clojure for my projects. Especially for web stuff Clojure is just excellent. It also doesn't hurt that you can actually get a job coding Clojure if you're experienced (or so I hear)