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Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

ferret-lang.org

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Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#81
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same as you did when I first saw it and got a bit sad. I'm actually considering trying to implement something like Lisp Flavored Perl a la Lisp Flavoured Erlang as my senior thesis/project this year. I'm kind of torn though, as it's my second real idea and my director already likes my first idea. While that one will probably end up being too much work, this one might be overcompensating for that (althou…

Well, there's a few already implemented an on cpan[1], so even if you were being optimistic thinking you could do it without outside input, the truth is there's plenty of Perl specific prior art to examine which likely makes it quite easy to make a simple Lisp. I'm not sure how that maps to what you were thinking of. 1: https://metacpan.org/search?q=lisp

Oh, awesome, thank you. I hadn't looked on CPAN directly yet and general searches apparently weren't coming up with relevant CPAN results. CljPerl[1] is right along the lines of the sort of project I was thinking of doing.

I didn't specify, but I'm actually thinking of target Perl 6, so this is a great sort of halfway point where clearly other people have found it a worthwhile idea but not done exactly what I was thinking. Plus, P6 slangs could make it nice and easy to interleave regular Perl 6 and Perl 5 code with whatever monstrosity I come up with. I guess I have some decisions to make. Thanks again!

1: https://metacpan.org/pod/CljPerl

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#82
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship with Java is both a benefit and a disadvantage of Clojure. > Why not Racket or Common Lisp etc? These already have solutions in the compilation space. Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL), a fairly old implementation tracing back to the 1980's, and its descendant GNU Common Lisp (GCL) compile to C. Embeddable Common Lisp (ECL) also contains a Lisp to C compiler. Of course, numerous CL implementations compile to n…

Btw: ECL is also a descendant of KCL. Like AKCL, MKCL, Delphi CL, Ibuki CL, GCL. Other Lisp-to-C compilers like CLICC, mocl, Thinlisp, and a few others are not descendants of KCL.

I'm looking at CLICC now a bit.

Boy, the implementors made a significant mistake in this one. Though CLICC is not intended to be a complete Lisp system, but a Lisp application, they insisted that CLICC has to itself be a CLICC-compiled application. And so what that means is that, then, programs being compiled with this bootstrapped CLICC are severely limited as to what they can do at compile time (in macros), simply because of the crippled run-time environment of the CLICC-compiled CLICC compiler which has to run without the benefit of an actual CL runtime. Whereas if CLICC had been kept as a Lisp-compiled program, only the run-time parts of user code would be restricted to the "CL1" language; macros could be written in full CL.

Re: Ferret – A free software Clojure implementation

#83
post #55
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.

Cursive is a very mature project nowadays. I'm surprised at how advanced it is considering how dynamic Clojure is.
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