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Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

sbcl.org

11–20 of 172 posts

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#12
I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#13
post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

We wouldn't have need such barbaric things in a lisp world. :p

Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.

Maybe the world would be guix/Hurd!

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#15
post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

We wouldn't have need such barbaric things in a lisp world. :p Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc. Maybe the world would be guix/Hurd!

> Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.

Yeah, that, uh, doesn't sound like Lisp

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#16
post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

We wouldn't have need such barbaric things in a lisp world. :p Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc. Maybe the world would be guix/Hurd!

Common lisp isn't functional in that sense.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#18
post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Lisp's been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain't using it at work.

I'm strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language.

The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.

Racket's theme of being a "programming language for building programming languages" is just the poster child of this naivety: I don't want even more friction.

What scales and works is simple and boring.

That's by the way why also Haskell has struggled forever. Beyond its dreadful DX, poor tooling and unacceptable compilation times, the language is just plagued by compiler extensions and every single developer reinventing its own abstractions.

There was the simple haskell movement to just standardize around a set of extensions and conventions, but nope, these languages unavoidably attract people that want to stay in the ivory tower.

Really, I love both lisps and haskell, but I would take a dreadful php over them every single day at work. No contest.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#19
post #12

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

We wouldn't have need such barbaric things in a lisp world. :p Personally I think/hope they would have earlier discoveries / more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc. Maybe the world would be guix/Hurd!

Common Lisp is pretty much the opposite of what people think of as functional nowadays. You're constantly changing the image and everything is mutable.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#20

If any SBCL dev is here, please add documentation for how to use the memory arena feature. The only doc is an very old proposal document.

Yeah I'm not sure why it's not in the manual, as it's had arena allocation support since at least 2.4.x, but basically:

- use SB-VM:NEW-ARENA to make a new arena

- use SB-VM:WITH-ARENA to redirect ordinary allocation into an existing arena like you would use WITH-OPEN-FILE or similar macros

The only real doc is this internals note, and it doesn't even cover NEW-ARENA which I guess is left as an exercise to the reader: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/doc/internals-notes...

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