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The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

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Re: The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

#3

Post by nonbirithm »

I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels like a Lisp dialect with similar style to Lua: tables, coroutines, small language core, embeddable as a single C file, etc.

[0] https://www.janet-lang.org

Re: The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

#4

Post by kazinator »

nonbirithm wrote: post #3

I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…

You might like TXR Lisp.

https://www.nongnu.org/txr

Re: The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

#5

Post by lispm »

nonbirithm wrote: post #3

I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…

SBCL's programs are 40MB because they contain all dev tools and the code is native code, which is also large.

There are a bunch of Common Lisp implementations which are smaller (CLISP), can create small applications (Lispworks), can be embedded (ECL) or can compile to smallish C code (mocl).

Re: The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

#6

Post by FPGAhacker »

nonbirithm wrote: post #3

I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…

You might find Fennel interesting:

https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel

It's a lua based lisp. Technomancy of clojure fame has taken a shine to it and become a large contributor.

Re: The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

#8

Post by sansnomme »

lispm wrote: post #5
nonbirithm wrote: post #3

I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…

SBCL's programs are 40MB because they contain all dev tools and the code is native code, which is also large. There are a bunch of Common Lisp implementations which are smaller (CLISP), can create small applications (Lispworks), can be embedded (ECL) or can compile to smallish C code (mocl).

Also, Common Lisp's standard library cannot compare to Python, Java etc. They have a lot of language manipulation tools but not actually anything that will help you ship quickly if you are building generic CRUD style applications. CL tends to shine when it comes to extremely domain specific niche stuff where you practically have to write your own tooling from scratch.

Re: The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

#9

Post by klipt »

nonbirithm wrote: post #3

I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…

Why not just use a smarter compiler/linker that trims out unused library code?

Re: The Tragedy of the Common Lisp: Why Large Languages Explode

#10

Post by mindB »

FPGAhacker wrote: post #6
nonbirithm wrote: post #3

I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…

You might find Fennel interesting: https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel It's a lua based lisp. Technomancy of clojure fame has taken a shine to it and become a large contributor.

If it's the same project I'm thinking of, Janet is actually by the same developer as fennel. Janet was kind of his followup project to fennel.
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