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Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

sbcl.org

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Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#141

Post by p_l »

jhgb wrote: post #132
p_l wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sane bootstrap is not about porting to new architecture, but about building the compiler from source in the first place. CMU CL effectively requires that you use the same version of CMU CL to build it, IIRC, which in practice meant you had to first load the changes into older CMU CL image - overwriting core components, and then use that image to compile new version. The difference with SBCL is that it can compile…

> As for the bytecode, as far as I recall CMU CL did not have bytecode compiler at all The byte code compilation option is described in CMUCL documentation, section 5.9 Byte Coded Compilation: https://cmucl.org/docs/cmu-user/html/Byte-Coded-Compilation....

Ah, with how cmucl was problematic to get running I never delved that deep. It indeed is not present in SBCL.

That said, as mentioned, it gave no real impact on bootstrappability nor portability

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#142

Post by wduquette »

klibertp wrote: post #58
ivxvm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere is where exactly? I've been thinking of where I could use it for like 10 minutes, and I couldn't come up with anything. Maybe a game engine or web services. It wouldn't make much sense for any kind of desktop software or command line utilities that are supposed to start really fast and have minimal runtime.

On the contrary, CLI, TUI, and desktop GUI apps are basically the only kinds of apps that benefit from CL and can live with its shortcomings. The startup time of a tool written in CL is short: you just need to load the image into RAM, run some hooks (if configured), and you're good to go. If you don't include loads of dependencies, the dumped image is also not too big, so loading it from an SSD is almost instantaneou…

What GUI would one use with SBCL? Is it cross-platform, Linux/Mac/Windows?

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#143

Post by agumonkey »

dismalaf wrote: post #90
agumonkey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah it's a strange aspect of that lisp era, it was born in mccarthy's recursive functions over recursive lists.. and then interactive development over global state added as a layer. i would argue that lispers use of mutability was much more surgical and principled but maybe i'm biased

McCarthy's pure Lisp existed only on paper. The first Lisp that ran on a computer had mutable variables, as did Lisp 1.5, Maclisp, etc... Immutability requires lots of copying and early computers didn't have much memory to spare...

fair point but from memory most of early programs in his paper were purely immutable in nature (tree recursion and substition), right ?

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#144

Post by anthk »

neutronicus wrote: post #124
tyromaniac wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://guix.gnu.org/

Yeah, I mean, I know it exists, but the mythology of Lisp is built around "I can drop into a REPL and execute arbitrary code on a production system and that is a good thing"

You can with Guix, just save your config in a new deployment for a new boot.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#145

Post by anthk »

iLemming wrote: post #81
epolanski wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that kind of developer exists everywhere, but is still limited by the tools you reign in him. > I think most people who have led teams will know exactly what I'm talking about. I've had those as leads themselves, with great benefit and pain. They further convinced me about the beauty of ugly and boring.

You clearly and obviously have little or none of practical, genuine experience working with experienced Lispers, and driving your opinions from a book-read definitions rather from actual, battle-tested work. Your line up of Lisp and Haskell next to one another is already telling - the two cultures can't be more different. Haskell culture historically have selected for people who enjoy theory for its own sake. Lisp cu…

> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude.

SICP tells me otherwise.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#146

Post by vincent-manis »

anthk wrote: post #145
iLemming wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly and obviously have little or none of practical, genuine experience working with experienced Lispers, and driving your opinions from a book-read definitions rather from actual, battle-tested work. Your line up of Lisp and Haskell next to one another is already telling - the two cultures can't be more different. Haskell culture historically have selected for people who enjoy theory for its own sake. Lisp cu…

> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude. SICP tells me otherwise.

SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn some of the people on to CS as a discipline.)

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#147

Post by Jach »

anthk wrote: post #145
iLemming wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly and obviously have little or none of practical, genuine experience working with experienced Lispers, and driving your opinions from a book-read definitions rather from actual, battle-tested work. Your line up of Lisp and Haskell next to one another is already telling - the two cultures can't be more different. Haskell culture historically have selected for people who enjoy theory for its own sake. Lisp cu…

> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude. SICP tells me otherwise.

SICP, as beautiful and good as it is, is probably responsible for a large amount of the misconceptions and negative thoughts about Lisp. SICP isn't a Lisp book, it's a Scheme book, and the Scheme culture is at least as different to Lisp (Common Lisp and its ancestors all the way back to McCarthy) as Java is to Python.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#148

Post by iLemming »

anthk wrote: post #145
iLemming wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly and obviously have little or none of practical, genuine experience working with experienced Lispers, and driving your opinions from a book-read definitions rather from actual, battle-tested work. Your line up of Lisp and Haskell next to one another is already telling - the two cultures can't be more different. Haskell culture historically have selected for people who enjoy theory for its own sake. Lisp cu…

> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude. SICP tells me otherwise.

Are you using a 42 year old book to find flaws in my argumentation? Let's talk real, contemporary numbers.

NuBank: from ~12M customers in 2019, grown to 25M in a year, then to 48M at IPO a year later, then to 114M in 2024, to 131M in 2025 - 991.67% growth within 6 years and still going. Not in theory, not conceptually, not because "SICP has told them". They did get-the-shit-done. Not acknowledging that Datomic and Clojure has something to do with this succes would be simply a dishonest gesture.

Walmart - the canonical "Clojure at scale" story. The eReceipts system processed every purchase across 5,000+ US stores plus online/mobile, built and maintained by just 8 developers. Architect Anthony Marcar's line after Black Friday: the system "handled its first Walmart Black Friday and came out without a scratch". They cited 5-10x less code than alternatives.

Apple - known for using Lisp for a long time.

Metabase - open-source BI. ~46k GitHub stars.

Amperity - customer data platform, "99% Clojure" - their own quote.

Netflix - been using Clojure since forever. Watch their talk from the last year's Conj. It's eye-opening on stability of complex systems.

Cisco - malware analysis platform. Multiple huge Clojure projects: IROH - Incident Response Orchestration Hub, CTIM/CTIA - Cisco Threat Intelligence Model and API, etc.

Braintree/PayPal - payments backend. CircleCI. Grammarly (this guys are on SBCL)

And that's just a short list of actual, real, profitable businesses built with and maintained using Lisp. I don't know what "SICP has told" you, but maybe you just need to look around, things have changed a bit since then.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#149

Post by anthk »

iLemming wrote: post #148
anthk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude. SICP tells me otherwise.

Are you using a 42 year old book to find flaws in my argumentation? Let's talk real, contemporary numbers. NuBank: from ~12M customers in 2019, grown to 25M in a year, then to 48M at IPO a year later, then to 114M in 2024, to 131M in 2025 - 991.67% growth within 6 years and still going. Not in theory, not conceptually, not because "SICP has told them". They did get-the-shit-done. Not acknowledging that Datomic and Cl…

I mean, both Scheme and CL have good libraries and a set of standards.

Re: Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

#150

Post by anthk »

Jach wrote: post #147
anthk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lisp culture genuinely prizes getting-shit-done attitude. SICP tells me otherwise.

SICP, as beautiful and good as it is, is probably responsible for a large amount of the misconceptions and negative thoughts about Lisp. SICP isn't a Lisp book, it's a Scheme book, and the Scheme culture is at least as different to Lisp (Common Lisp and its ancestors all the way back to McCarthy) as Java is to Python.

I know both CL and Scheme, thanks. And both philosophies overlap a lot. Heck, there's an Scheme interpreter in PAIP as en exercise...

I'd woudn't consider SICP negative, the same with all the good CL books (Intro to Symbolic Computation, Paradigms of AI Programming...)

Both are the ur-examples on how to grasp the basic of CS well.

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