BinaryBuilder.jl VS hebigo

There are some efforts and the startup times are getting better with every release and there's BinaryBuilder.jl.

There is the Julia package https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/BinaryBuilder.jl which creates an environment that fakes being another, but with the correct compilers and SDKs . It's used to build all the binary dependencies

https://binarybuilder.org/. You can do it manually obviously, but this is easier.

> The main pain point is probably the lack of standard, multi-environment packaging solutions for natively compiled code.

Are you talking about something like BinaryBuilder.jl[1], which provides native binaries as julia-callable wrappers?

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[1] https://binarybuilder.org

Julia did that for binary dependencies for a few years, with adapters for several linux platforms, homebrew, and for cross-compiled RPMs for Windows. It worked, to a degree -- less well on Windows -- but the combinatorial complexity led to many hiccups and significant maintenance effort. Each Julia package had to account for the peculiarities of each dependency across a range of dependency versions and packaging practices (linkage policies, bundling policies, naming variations, distro versions) -- and this is easier in Julia than in (C)Python because shared libraries are accessed via locally-JIT'd FFI, so there is no need to eg compile extensions for 4 different CPython ABIs (Julia also has syntactic macros which can be helpful here).

To provide a better experience for both package authors and users, as well as reducing the maintenance burden, the community has developed and migrated to a unified system called BinaryBuilder (https://binarybuilder.org) over the past 2-3 years. BinaryBuilder allows targeting all supported platforms with a single build script and also "audits" build products for common compatibility and linkage snafus (similar to some of the conda-build tooling and auditwheel). There was a nice talk at AlpineConf recently (https://alpinelinux.org/conf/) covering some of this history and detailing BinaryBuilder, although I'm not sure how to link into the video.

All that to say: it can work to an extent, but it has been tried various times before. The fact that conda and manylinux don't use system packages was not borne out of inexperience, either. The idea of "make binaries a distro packager's problem" sounds like a simplifying step, but that doesn't necessarily work out.

The Lissp transpiler incrementally compiles and executes each top-level form to Python. It needs to do this in case there's a macro definition that might affect the compilation of a subsequent form. If it's only executing definitions, this is harmless, but if you want to precompile the main module, it needs the guard, or the side effects will happen too.

If you want Python to be as customizable as Lissp, check out Hissp (and Hebigo).

Python's lambdas can have as many lines as you want. Just wrap parens around it. Hissp uses this form as a compilation target. Its REPL shows the Python compilation. Play around with it til you get it: https://github.com/gilch/hissp

The original Lisp's S-expression syntax was just supposed to be an intermediate language used by the compiler when processing the real language based on M-expressions, which kind of never took off. Numerous alternatives to S-expressions have been proposed, and some retain homoiconicity, another feature diagnostic of a Lisp (and one that ECMAScript lacks). For example, see Hebigo's readme, which shows a direct correspondence between its Python-like syntax and that of Hissp's default reader (Lissp), which uses the S-expressions. Julia can also be written in S-expressions, but this usually only used in macro definitions.

I think LoL is too CL-specific. If you know both languages first, you can pretty much translate, but since they'd be trying to learn Lisp in the first place, this is a bad idea.

On the other hand, [Hissp][1] has a pretty good tutorial for anyone coming from a Python background.

[1]: https://github.com/gilch/hissp

Hebigo: a whitespaceLisp isomorphic to Hissp that looks like Python.