4 ms·

Ahem, this is a thin UI wrapper around a browser engine written in C++ called WebKit, the main UI elements being in reality a thin lisp wrapper around a C UI fr

Ahem, this is a thin UI wrapper around a browser engine written in C++ called WebKit, the main UI elements being in reality a thin lisp wrapper around a C UI framework called GTK. Calling this a Lisp browser is like using Xmonad and calling Linux a Haskell Operating System.

chongli 12y ago
Yeah. A proper Lisp browser would run on one of those old Symbolics machines. It would eschew html, css and javascript in favour of lisp for all 3. Instead of jpgs or gifs it would use Peter Henderson's picture language to describe all images, as it was famously demonstrated in SICP.
- justin_vanw 12y ago
  You have failed to understand the point I was making. Instead, you have created some kind of dumb straw man viewpoint to argue against.
  - AeroNotix 12y ago
    Then what is your argument? That it's worthless because it's not written in pure Lisp? Look at the Closure browser, it's awful and incomplete. There just isn't enough manpower in the Lisp community to accomplish something such as that.
eudox 12y ago
Xmonad is a thin wrapper over the C X11 api, etc.
fdsary 12y ago
I wouldn't call Xmonad a window manager, but just a thin wrapper around X11 (C?) that happens to be written in haskell.
sedachv 12y ago
It's a lot easier to drive WebKit from Lisp than to try to get the Closure web browser to HTML 5.
kyllo 12y ago
Or like calling Chrome a "Javascript browser"
swah 12y ago
Fact: most interesting software is written in C, C++ or Java. (But the most beautiful software of them all, that arcane environment so many love, has a substantial lisp layer... so we got that going)
_pmf_ 12y ago
> Ahem, this is a thin UI wrapper around a browser engine written in C++ called WebKit Well, you can browse Lisp sites with it, so there's that ...
AeroNotix 12y ago
Author here. Using that logic you can reduce a whole heap of things down to just "thin wrappers". Yes, LispKit is a wrapper around a C++/C browser library. But would you really want someone writing yet another browser implementation in 2014? It's just not good engineering to rewrite things such as that. They're complicated, filled with security edge cases and would take a substantial amount of time compared to "just" writing a wrapper library. In reality, LispKit exposes the WebKit API through Lisp using a bunch of relatively idiomatic (if I do say so myself!) functions and macros. For the most part it seems as if Lispkit was built from the ground up in Lisp. It does not feel like a "thin wrapper".
- ltbarcly3 12y ago
  Fantastic! Wrapping WebKit is a great idea. I mean it generally hasn't worked well for other libraries that have tried it, none of them have managed to avoid lots and lots of bugs and quirky behavior, but maybe you do, so congratulations. My only point is that this isn't a browser written in Lisp. It's not even remotely close to that! Yet that is what the title of the HN story implies. But it's not that, it's a wrapper, which is not what the title says, so I mentioned that. You are agreeing with me except you seem to think I'm implying something bad, which I'm not, beyond all the things implied by the facts, such as: It does inevitably just feel like a thin wrapper. There is no way for a lisp hacker to get in there and play with it, or take this work and extend it using lisp. They can change how WebKit is wrapped, but changing or extending WebKit's behavior means digging into WebKit's millions of lines of C++.

chongli 12y ago

Yeah. A proper Lisp browser would run on one of those old Symbolics machines. It would eschew html, css and javascript in favour of lisp for all 3. Instead of jpgs or gifs it would use Peter Henderson's picture language to describe all images, as it was famously demonstrated in SICP.

justin_vanw 12y ago
You have failed to understand the point I was making. Instead, you have created some kind of dumb straw man viewpoint to argue against.
- AeroNotix 12y ago
  Then what is your argument? That it's worthless because it's not written in pure Lisp? Look at the Closure browser, it's awful and incomplete. There just isn't enough manpower in the Lisp community to accomplish something such as that.

eudox 12y ago

Xmonad is a thin wrapper over the C X11 api, etc.

fdsary 12y ago

I wouldn't call Xmonad a window manager, but just a thin wrapper around X11 (C?) that happens to be written in haskell.

sedachv 12y ago

It's a lot easier to drive WebKit from Lisp than to try to get the Closure web browser to HTML 5.

kyllo 12y ago

Or like calling Chrome a "Javascript browser"

swah 12y ago

Fact: most interesting software is written in C, C++ or Java. (But the most beautiful software of them all, that arcane environment so many love, has a substantial lisp layer... so we got that going)

_pmf_ 12y ago

> Ahem, this is a thin UI wrapper around a browser engine written in C++ called WebKit Well, you can browse Lisp sites with it, so there's that ...

AeroNotix 12y ago

Author here. Using that logic you can reduce a whole heap of things down to just "thin wrappers". Yes, LispKit is a wrapper around a C++/C browser library. But would you really want someone writing yet another browser implementation in 2014? It's just not good engineering to rewrite things such as that. They're complicated, filled with security edge cases and would take a substantial amount of time compared to "just" writing a wrapper library. In reality, LispKit exposes the WebKit API through Lisp using a bunch of relatively idiomatic (if I do say so myself!) functions and macros. For the most part it seems as if Lispkit was built from the ground up in Lisp. It does not feel like a "thin wrapper".

ltbarcly3 12y ago
Fantastic! Wrapping WebKit is a great idea. I mean it generally hasn't worked well for other libraries that have tried it, none of them have managed to avoid lots and lots of bugs and quirky behavior, but maybe you do, so congratulations. My only point is that this isn't a browser written in Lisp. It's not even remotely close to that! Yet that is what the title of the HN story implies. But it's not that, it's a wrapper, which is not what the title says, so I mentioned that. You are agreeing with me except you seem to think I'm implying something bad, which I'm not, beyond all the things implied by the facts, such as: It does inevitably just feel like a thin wrapper. There is no way for a lisp hacker to get in there and play with it, or take this work and extend it using lisp. They can change how WebKit is wrapped, but changing or extending WebKit's behavior means digging into WebKit's millions of lines of C++.