Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM – a CAD workflow invented 33 yrs ago

acadlisp.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–47 of 47 posts

Re: Show HN: AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM – a CAD workflow invented 33 yrs ago

#41

Post by holg »

antod wrote: post #33
holg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still your most fluent - that says something about how the language shaped thinking. The neglect is real; Autodesk clearly wants everyone on .NET, but there's a lot of institutional knowledge and working code out there that just... works. Part of why I built this: preservation. If AutoLISP fades from AutoCAD entirely, at least the workflow can live on in the browser.

I cargo culted my way into AutoLISP in the R12 era knowing nothing about lisp or funtional programming (BASIC and a tiny bit of Pascal was all I'd done by then). Just using notepad without any assists like highlighting matching parentheses and no deeper theoretical knowledge was tough, but I could see vague outlines of a world of mathematical elegance just out of my grasp.

"Vague outlines of mathematical elegance just out of grasp" - that's exactly it. Notepad, no paren matching, just counting brackets by hand. The elegance was there, we just couldn't quite see it yet.

Re: Show HN: AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM – a CAD workflow invented 33 yrs ago

#42

Post by holg »

Huge thanks to everyone in this thread — the stories, pointers, and critique were genuinely useful (and motivating). Quick update: we pushed a big round of UI fixes and the site is now properly usable on mobile. Also, I compiled Betz’s original XLISP (C) to WASM and hooked it up as a side-by-side benchmark, and the first external PR just landed: KiCad export is now in (symbols + footprints), so the same template workflow can emit .kicad_sym / .kicad_mod. Really grateful for the help here.

Re: Show HN: AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM – a CAD workflow invented 33 yrs ago

#43

Post by holg »

oofoe wrote: post #37
Animats wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Lisp is special, and for those times it was very special. It was the only language available at the time suitable for embedding. Memory-safe, small interpreter, sane. Alternatives were Forth and TRAC, which would have been much worse. Pascal would have been better, but it was too hard to squeeze in. The program and data had to fit in 640K. The program was built as a tree of overlays and code was swapped in, so…

You may be already aware with this, but if not, Walker actually did write a small Forth (ATLAST -- https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/ ) which was used for (I think) DXFTOOL (a file converter). It was later used by a small computer graphics studio in Tennessee for a blue/green screen matting utility and a fast roto-paint program.

Very interesting, even if tools like ATLAST had been available for free back then, AutoLISP would have won. HP-41CV programming had already wired my brain for stack thinking, and LISP felt like the natural next step. Forth was too raw, LISP had just enough structure.

Re: Show HN: AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM – a CAD workflow invented 33 yrs ago

#44

Post by holg »

bitwize wrote: post #36

Ah, Autolisp. Based on an early, early version of XLisp, it's zombie software: not quite alive—Autodesk really wants you to use its COM and .NET integration to program AutoCAD—nor can it truly die. It was also the first Lisp I ever programmed, and back in the mid-90s there was a trend of putting a Lisp, or Tcl, into all the things (Emacs, GIMP, frickin' Abuse...) and Autolisp had prepared me for that world rather wel…

That mid-90s trend of embedding Lisp/Tcl everywhere was special. Everyone understood: give users a real language, not just config files. Emacs, GIMP, Abuse, AutoCAD - all bet on "let users program it." Now we have YAML and JSON configs. Progress? Part of why I built this: if AutoLISP becomes truly undead inside AutoCAD, at least the workflow and playground can live on independently in the browser.

Re: Show HN: AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM – a CAD workflow invented 33 yrs ago

#46

Post by lambda »

holg wrote: post #4
lambda wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a 404 for that repo; is it private? Also, the page you link to in the original post is in German; it might be nice to have an English page for the mostly English speaking audience here on HN

fixed it, thx for the notice

Thanks, the repo link works now!

And I had been looking at it on mobile, which might have been why I was having an issue with the site; now that I'm looking at the site on a desktop browser it looks much better.

Post reply on HN