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Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET
- Rochus 5mo agoThis is amazing. How long did it take you to implement it, i.e. reach that high level of Ansi test conformance? Have you been able to reuse concepts e.g. from ABCL?
- guenthert 5mo agoYeah, pity that the early history seems to have been lost.
- freedomben 5mo agoUnfortunate near naming collision for people using doctl (the Digital Ocean CLI). I can foresee a lot of shell muscle memory causing me to use the wrong tool :-D Really cool project! Love seeing CL work it's way into as many envs as possible
- SomeHacker44 5mo agoAwesome! Has a MonoGame integration sample. Am curious to see if it will work with Godot or Unity. New weekend project...
- pjmlp 5mo agoGreat! A new toy on my toolbox. Kudos on the implementation.
- v9v 5mo agoThere's also Bike for CL/.NET interop: https://github.com/Lovesan/bike https://github.com/Lovesan/bike
- Pay08 5mo agoI was just wondering the other day if this exists. Great timing.
- d-us-vb 5mo agoDotcl sounds like a lisp macro that interprets TCL. :D
- jnpnj 5mo agohehe. alternatively dotnil would have sounded closer to dotnet while hinting at lisp terminology and history
- anthk 5mo agoGiven how simple TCL is you would probably write a parser in a day... JimTCL (jimsh interpreter) is not 100% TCL compatible and I just used 'source qcomplex.tcl' from it's big brother TCL and now I can do complex number operations in the spot. With just a simple file, no libraries, no nothing.
- cjbgkagh 5mo agoNeat, I see AOT, will this be able to target WASM? I’m guessing there will be a mode that doesn’t use reflection emit since AOT doesn’t support that? I would check myself but I’m away from my computer.
- aboardRat4 5mo agoDoes it have tail recursion?
- guenthert 5mo agoI'm pretty sure it does. I would even think that it tries to optimize such, as a recent check-in comment claims improvements of TCO.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoA lisp without tail recursion would be a sad thing.
- shawn_w 5mo agoCommon Lisp does not require implementations preform tail call optimization in general, or even in just the limited case of tail recursion.
- aidenn0 5mo agoIt's not unusual for lisp interpreters to lack TCO. Also the (relative) popularity of dynamic binding in Common Lisp reduced the opportunities for TCO. There's not really a consensus in the parts of the CL community that I'm familiar with on whether or not code relying on TCO is idiomatic or not.
- runevault 5mo agoIf nothing else dotnet has TCO IL operations (C# doesn't compile down to them last I knew but F# does) so in theory shouldn't be hard to add.
- pjmlp 5mo agoMSIL was designed to support plenty of languages, including C and C++, which WebAssembly advocates tend to never mention. As such there are plenty of MSIL and CLR capabilities not yet fully exposed in C#. One of the improvements in C# during the last decade, has been exposing low level coding abilities into C#, which is nothing more than taking advantage of those primitives originally designed for C and C++ support. Likewise, .NET also had support back in 2001 for FP languages, thus TCO. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2001/10/22/massive-industry-and-developer-support-for-microsoft-net-on-display-at-professional-developers-conference-2001/ https://news.microsoft.com/source/2001/10/22/massive-industr...
- register 5mo agoKudos, this is what I was looking for. Time to add dynamic "scripting" to my .net projects.
- djha-skin 5mo agoI have recently blogged that AI and Common Lisp don't mix, but I've come to the opposite conclusion lately. AI evens the playing field between large teams and single developers. Now all the lone wolves in cl will be able to do large things, like a .net implementation or a yaml parser. I heard one guy say he was using AI to write a c complete in common lisp. I wonder if AI was used here or not.
- pjmlp 5mo agoHad it not been for UNIX taking over the Lisp workstations market, followed by the first AI winter, people would be using LispTorch today, and there wouldn't have been such a waste coming up with endless ways to speed up Python, and efforts like Mojo wouldn't even be a thing.
- Pay08 5mo agoNot really the "fault" of UNIX. The Lisp workstations would have been just as unpopular without it. They were insanely expensive and the idea of a workstation was ahead of its time, not to mention the other "unneeded" extras like GUIs, a mouse, and the photo editing and 3D modelling suites. It was plainly uneconomical.
- pjmlp 5mo agoUNIX was only cheap because AT&T was forbidden to profit from it, had it not been the case, it would have been a proprietary closed source OS, exactly at similar price points. The proof being the graphical UNIX workstations from Cray, SGI, Sun, NeXT that came later into the market.
- Pay08 5mo agoThe dimension you're missing here is that most of the Lisp OSs were single-user (AFAIK initially all of them were but some gained multi-user support later) in a period when timeshare was king. Not to mention that the hardware itself cost multiple times more to manufacture.
- Syzygies 5mo agoAny benchmarks? I have a combinatorial enumeration comparison project where the .NET jit optimized my hot loops for F# to in some cases matching Rust performance. F# is inspired by OCaml, and for me F# runs twice as fast. Scala got a face lift where indentation replaces syntax, a modern poetry look many of us can't live without. It is entirely practical to eliminate most parentheses from Lisp (I have written thousands of lines of Scheme this way, hands down my favorite code to read), but doing so will lead to a tribal swarm attack. It is also easy to train Common Lisp to lay off the caps, but any stock installation greets users with an old man shouting (GET OFF (MY LAWN)). The idea of Lisp is pure genius. One wonders where we would be today if any Lisp took a more pragmatic attitude towards encouraging adoption.
- jonnytran 5mo agoHave you tried Clojure?
- arikrahman 5mo agoThis has been the best grounded approach of introducing Lisp to the masses, myself included. Rich Hickey made a language that is the most well positioned in this new LLM era.
- Blackthorn 5mo agoClojure isn't known for performance.
- arikrahman 5mo agoIt has very good throughput since it's targeting the JVM. JEP 514 and JEP 515 are also making AOT a real thing, reducing warmup times. This means user will not even have to use the awesome Babashka project for scripts or drop in GraalVM.
- Syzygies 5mo agoI admire Clojure, and Rich Hickey's deep experience and knowledge of languages that he brought to the table. Clojure bottomed out for my comparison. Perhaps an expert could strike a better balance, but it struck me and my various agents that we'd be fighting the language to make it faster. https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare
- algorithmsRcool 5mo agoNot my project, but I feel mention of IronScheme is appropriate. Leppie has been maintaining it for many years now. [0] https://github.com/IronScheme/IronScheme https://github.com/IronScheme/IronScheme
- geospeck 5mo agoThere is also a native implementation of Clojure on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr
- croes 5mo agoDoes it have a REPL?