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An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

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Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#41

Post by dasyatidprime »

pfdietz wrote: post #33
medo-bear wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think had there been solid cheap or free Smalltalk and Common Lisp implementations around 1992, Java wouldn’t have gained a foothold, though C++ would have still been very appealing to C developers, though perhaps if Objective-C were more broadly available to non-NeXT developers, it would’ve been a formidable competitor to C++ in terms of providing a “C with objects” environment. 100% agree. i think it is also int…

There's basically one commercial Common Lisp left (Allegro from Franz), and they're focusing more on things built on top of the Lisp (like AllegroGraph), not the Lisp itself. So the free CLs have sort of won by default, and perhaps also by sucking the oxygen out of the room for expensive proprietary CLs.

Do you not count LispWorks in this? I haven't had a chance to play with the commercial Lisps myself, but anecdotally it seems to still have some currency.

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#42

Post by igouy »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #39
fooker wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Couldn't have done it without SBCL Could you elaborate this part?

I still haven't found an environment which lets you build the system as seamlessly as SBCL. The REPL allows you to build the code at runtime and update the system in place. Since I was a solodev, bug fixing and building the thing without going on the wrong path was worth I think months and years of my time. edit: Once you get the idea of a running Lisp image and you are updating the image it's a game changer. You are…

> image and you are updating the image it's a game changer.

Also Smalltalk.

https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/2023-August/...

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#43

Post by lispm »

pfdietz wrote: post #33
medo-bear wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think had there been solid cheap or free Smalltalk and Common Lisp implementations around 1992, Java wouldn’t have gained a foothold, though C++ would have still been very appealing to C developers, though perhaps if Objective-C were more broadly available to non-NeXT developers, it would’ve been a formidable competitor to C++ in terms of providing a “C with objects” environment. 100% agree. i think it is also int…

There's basically one commercial Common Lisp left (Allegro from Franz), and they're focusing more on things built on top of the Lisp (like AllegroGraph), not the Lisp itself. So the free CLs have sort of won by default, and perhaps also by sucking the oxygen out of the room for expensive proprietary CLs.

LispWorks still exists and works great.

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#44

Post by pfdietz »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #41
pfdietz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's basically one commercial Common Lisp left (Allegro from Franz), and they're focusing more on things built on top of the Lisp (like AllegroGraph), not the Lisp itself. So the free CLs have sort of won by default, and perhaps also by sucking the oxygen out of the room for expensive proprietary CLs.

Do you not count LispWorks in this? I haven't had a chance to play with the commercial Lisps myself, but anecdotally it seems to still have some currency.

I didn't, but perhaps I should have. There's a question of whether it's live enough to count, or if it's just in maintenance mode. The last release was in 2021, but there have been gaps that long before that.

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#45

Post by fooker »

thewakalix wrote: post #40
fooker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit Haskell oriented, but the "Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" by SPJ is one of my all time favorite books. https://simon.peytonjones.org/slpj-book-1987/ These compilers were pulling heroic data structure optimization stunts in 1985, that no modern production compiler for major compiled languages can replicate in 2024.

Why? Is it mostly because of Haskell's purity (side-effect-freeness), so optimizations can change expressions more freely and safely?

That, and the uniform s-expr/gadt representation of data structures instead of going wild with clever pointers.

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#46

Post by koito17 »

I wish other Common Lisp implementations, particularly Clozure CL, documented their internals as well as SBCL does. Apple Silicon support has been a long-standing feature request, but nobody can really work on it besides rme himeself due to the sheer amount of "institutional knowledge" (and time!) it takes to understand CCL's compiler backend then add support for a brand new architecture. SBCL, on the other hand, was able to provide support fairly quick, possibly due to more maintainers, but I also think a big role that played in it was the fact lots of corners of the implementation are documented and it's fairly easily to get a hold of people actively working on the compiler (doug, stassats, et al)

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#47

Post by wglb »

medo-bear wrote: post #25
dreamcompiler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And CCL doesn't even have an interpreter. Every form you type into the REPL is compiled. If you want an interpreter in CCL you have to write it yourself.

worth mentioning is that CCL is finally back into active development !

Who is doing the development currently?

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#48

Post by wglb »

linguae wrote: post #20
fooker wrote: post #2

It's a bit sad that this ecosystem has fallen out of favor for mainstream software development. One could have designed OOP like frontends to this fairly easily, and I'm sure there are existing ones. How did Java and C++ take over?

Let’s make a trip back to the early and mid 1990s when C++ was a young language and Java was under development (it was released in 1995). At the time the most popular object-oriented language was Smalltalk, Common Lisp was at its peak of commercial popularity (largely in symbolic AI niches), and there were other niche OO languages that were heavily influenced by Smalltalk and Common Lisp (Objective-C in the NeXT worl…

Well, there is this: https://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#49

Post by akira2501 »

fooker wrote: post #2

It's a bit sad that this ecosystem has fallen out of favor for mainstream software development. One could have designed OOP like frontends to this fairly easily, and I'm sure there are existing ones. How did Java and C++ take over?

> for mainstream software development.

LISP feels like both an "assembly language" and a "higher level language" at the same time. It's excellent for solving unusual problems, but it carries a lot of baggage when aiming for "usual" problems.

Re: An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)

#50

Post by wglb »

FredPret wrote: post #34
aredox wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Lem too. https://lem-project.github.io/

I really want to like lem, so I followed all the steps at both https://lem-project.github.io/installation/sdl2/macos/ and https://lem-project.github.io/installation/ncurses/macos/ . Neither ends in a working development environment or even text editor. Compare this to learning Python or Javascript or the C family. VSCode or even just your standard OS text editor is all you need. You can decide to start learning, find…

Paul Graham used VI and clisp when he built viaweb.
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