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Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

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21–30 of 58 posts

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#22
It looks cool enough, but I wish more of these modern Lisp implementations would ask to implement the Common Lisp standard rate than their own, informally-specified version of Lisp. Yeah, Common Lisp is not perfect, but it does have a lot of excellent ideas, and some of the bits which don't look excellent actually are (e.g. pathnames and logical pathnames).

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#23
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 61 commits and only one contributor. This isn't a good complaint, and the snark makes it worse.

The snark wasn't necessary indeed, and as an early-stage project, lacking documentation is understandable. As an HN post however, if you tease us with "magical features" in the title, I'd expect to have the magic shown to me in the linked page, or at the very least in the top comment. I shouldn't have to grok the sources to figure it out.

Submitter here, I went with name of project + github title rather than editorialize.

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#24
post #22

It looks cool enough, but I wish more of these modern Lisp implementations would ask to implement the Common Lisp standard rate than their own, informally-specified version of Lisp. Yeah, Common Lisp is not perfect, but it does have a lot of excellent ideas, and some of the bits which don't look excellent actually are (e.g. pathnames and logical pathnames).

Common Lisp is too big for a typical application (e.g., embedded scripting engines, mataprogramming hosts, etc.). And it's a Lisp-2, which is quite a deterrent for many.

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#25
post #19
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 61 commits and only one contributor. This isn't a good complaint, and the snark makes it worse.

Thanks, i already noticed the age of the project :). The ""complaint"" is obviously valid, i'd add at least half a page of examples to explain what it does and how to try it, just to increase the chance of contribution. No snarkiness was intended... but looks like it came out that way.

I didn't take your use of “documentation” to be so loose, but I agree that it should have an explanation for the use of “magical” in the title. The author has since added an explanation.

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#27
Author of pixie here. The project is still pretty young (about a month old), so I'll use that to explain away the lack of binaries, documentation, examples, etc. I've been more focused on adding features than getting stuff ready for presenting to the public. As an example, we didn't even have stack traces until a day or two ago.

That being said I'll try to answer any questions you may have. Thanks!

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#28
>Math system is fully polymorphic

Does it have fully polymorphic other basic functions, like setq, eql (or however they are named)? I guess not? Do you plan on introducing some parts of CLOS?

Lack of OO integration in CL is one of its biggest drawback for me... for me CLOS was the most powerful thing in lisp, not macros (mostly because they are not dynamic).

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#29

>Math system is fully polymorphic Does it have fully polymorphic other basic functions, like setq, eql (or however they are named)? I guess not? Do you plan on introducing some parts of CLOS? Lack of OO integration in CL is one of its biggest drawback for me... for me CLOS was the most powerful thing in lisp, not macros (mostly because they are not dynamic).

CLOS has been on my list to research for some time now, and I haven't made a decision on it yet. The goal would be to get the JIT to remove the method lookup completely, and that might get a bit tricky depending on how complex the lookup code is, but it is the most open dynamic OO system I've seen, so it might just be worth it.

Re: Pixie: A small fast, native lisp

#30
post #2

What's magical about it?

Added a few comments in the README about that.

Pixie implements its own virtual machine.

Isn't that how all the tiny lisps do it? :)

You know, maybe 'magic' simply sets the bar higher than the project is prepared to support. Consider 'clever'.

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