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Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

ferret-lang.org

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Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#51

Post by agumonkey »

penpapersw wrote: post #35

Having written Clojure full-time for the past 5 years while writing cleancoders.com has really spoiled me. Clojure's introspective nature makes for some amazingly fast productivity because you can hook up your IDE to the REPL and have a kind of super-REPL, which can really speed up development a ton if you design your system it right. I'm not sure if this project can keep that aspect because of how it compiles to C++…

There's a mooc on smalltalk on FUN. You should try it. You'll probably have a blast too.

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#52

Post by ungamed »

comex wrote: post #28
pivo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be working fine for me on iOS. Any particular page that's broken for you?

The homepage, but just now I refreshed and it started working. Odd. (I’m pretty sure I tried refreshing before, and it didn’t work then.)

I smell an infoleak. What version are you on ? See if you can recreate it with your history. The flaw might be worth something.

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#54

Post by vturner »

penpapersw wrote: post #35

Having written Clojure full-time for the past 5 years while writing cleancoders.com has really spoiled me. Clojure's introspective nature makes for some amazingly fast productivity because you can hook up your IDE to the REPL and have a kind of super-REPL, which can really speed up development a ton if you design your system it right. I'm not sure if this project can keep that aspect because of how it compiles to C++…

Curious what IDE you have set up to do the REPL driven development you mentioned? I'm just starting out in learning Clojure and am finding various options out there with vigorous proponents of each. I am wondering what someone's real-world experience is after 5 years.

It's hard sometimes to find the editors/IDEs that might suite one particularly well since the vast community is attached to a given platform.

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#55

Post by Oreb »

vturner wrote: post #54
penpapersw wrote: post #35

Having written Clojure full-time for the past 5 years while writing cleancoders.com has really spoiled me. Clojure's introspective nature makes for some amazingly fast productivity because you can hook up your IDE to the REPL and have a kind of super-REPL, which can really speed up development a ton if you design your system it right. I'm not sure if this project can keep that aspect because of how it compiles to C++…

Curious what IDE you have set up to do the REPL driven development you mentioned? I'm just starting out in learning Clojure and am finding various options out there with vigorous proponents of each. I am wondering what someone's real-world experience is after 5 years. It's hard sometimes to find the editors/IDEs that might suite one particularly well since the vast community is attached to a given platform.

The most mature Clojure development environments right now are Spacemacs/Emacs with CIDER (free) and IntelliJ IDEA with the Cursive plugin (commercial, but inexpensive). Both are excellent.

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#56

Post by pjmlp »

jzelinskie wrote: post #17
dbattaglia wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of saw it as being intended for someone that loves Clojure but needs to run in a constrained environment that usually requires C or C++.

Aren't most of these environments low on memory and thus it doesn't really make sense for them to use Clojure's persistent data structures? Kinda related is this awesome paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/11/27/hamt/

I always laugh when I see this complaints, given that Lisp was already running on IBM 7090, Univac M-460, IBM 360 and many other mainframes.

Any of those tiny environments run circles around the hardware constraints of 60's and 70's mainframes.

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#57

Post by ohpauleez »

Oreb wrote: post #55
vturner wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what IDE you have set up to do the REPL driven development you mentioned? I'm just starting out in learning Clojure and am finding various options out there with vigorous proponents of each. I am wondering what someone's real-world experience is after 5 years. It's hard sometimes to find the editors/IDEs that might suite one particularly well since the vast community is attached to a given platform.

The most mature Clojure development environments right now are Spacemacs/Emacs with CIDER (free) and IntelliJ IDEA with the Cursive plugin (commercial, but inexpensive). Both are excellent.

I'd also add that support in Vim and Neovim are also very good.

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#58

Post by e12e »

nakkaya wrote: post #50
dantiberian wrote: post #22

Does anyone have any insight on the legal status of this project? It’s licensed as BSD 2 Clause, but looks to be heavily derived from Clojure which is EPL. AFAIK the EPL is copyleft and doesn’t permit relicensing without the copyright holders’ permission.

Author here. I am actually curious about this myself. I originally released it under GPL but then on another HN thread someone said anything compiled with it also ends up being GPL, so I switched to BSD 2 Clause. I have not copy pasted code from Clojure compiler BUT in order to keep the Ferret semantics the same as Clojure semantics algorithms are identical. [1] shows + function in Ferret and Clojure. As for data str…

Nothing wrong with BSD - but as for a GPL compiler with a run-time, you could also look at the GCC/GNU libc licensing (GPL/LGPG). I do think it's important people are aware that GPL on things with a run-time should probably have an exception/use something like the LGPL - as you generally don't want "documents"/artifacts produced with a tool, to forcefully inherit the license of the tool used for creating them (eg: You don't want the word processor to force a license on documents produced, or the drawing application apply license to images - and the same goes for programming languages, IMNHO).

On another note, I'm not sure it would be quite possible to stretch "copyleft" that far legally anyway - but that's another discussion - and at ending up with an invalid license isn't really any good either, as that would leave you with just copyright and no license grant - making the tool illegal to copy/distribute...

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#60

Post by meredydd »

tomsmeding wrote: post #42
billsix wrote: post #24

I've been looking for a language which provides Software-Transactional-Memory with persistent data structures which fits in 2KB RAM on a microcontroller.

I doubt you'll find that quickly. You can't do much in 2kb if you don't want to mutate your data, I think. I don't know much about STM, but I'd wager that uses some extra bookkeeping memory as well. So unless your own memory requirements are really low, this won't work.

Fun fact: Clojure is one of the few languages in which STM is easy!

You're right in the general case - STM incurs significant bookkeeping overhead (at least a word per mutable location, usually more), which is one of the reasons it never took off. (The actual reason is the CPU overhead, which slows down memory accesses so much you've lost all the performance you might gain from parallelism.)

Clojure sidesteps this by having an incredibly small number of mutable locations. With a persistent data structures, every mutation operation already builds its own private version of the structure, and then atomically changes a pointer to point to the new version. So you've got MVCC built in, and you only need transactional metadata on one location (the ref).

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