SICL VS clj-kondo

This is a very approachable paper from 1990 on one way to do it with a C kernel bootstrapping to Common Lisp: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/kcl/paper... Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) is the ancestor of today's Embeddable Common Lisp (ECL).

SICL is probably the best modern version of CL written in CL from a design standpoint, even if it's not taking over SBCL's role anytime soon: https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL It uses some fancy bootstrapping to have the whole language available early, e.g. their definition of class 'symbol is:

    (defclass symbol (t)

That's pretty much the objective of SICL, which is "intentionally divided into many implementation-independent modules that are written in a totally or near-totally portable way, so as to allow other implementations to incorporate these modules from SICL, rather than having to maintain their own, perhaps implementation-specific versions".

   https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL

Gladly!

https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL (which I wrote a decent chunk of the compiler backend of.)

I applaud your curiosity and initiative to explore. Are you aware of https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL?

I mean this Klein and this SICL. Self and Common Lisp are memory-safe, though the implementations need capabilities to manipulate memory; SICL encapsulates them using first-class global environments.

There is significant overlap with SICL and its associated pieces which supply many of the other parts needed to make a Common Lisp. Some of these are Cluster which provides a portable and extensible assembler, Eclector which supplies a portable and extensible reader, Concrete-Syntax-Tree that supports source code tracking during compilation, ctype that implements the Common Lisp type system, and Clostrum that provides first-class environments for e.g. run-time, evaluation, and compilation. The SICL project has as one of its goals the creation of portable infrastructure for implementing Common Lisp, and these pieces are novel building blocks that were created as part of the project.

Not really; you can do it with primitive operations e.g. here is the list in the Cleavir compiler and a paper on "magic" in Jikes RVM. SBCL also has a "virtual op"/vop language for code generation, and vops are written to manipulate objects with assembly snippets.

Both work. I basically never have to touch C or even FFI (cl+ssl being the main use of FFI for me), unless I am poking at SBCL guts in my spare time, and that isn't necessary either. I am sure many Haskell hackers are happy with their IO monad too.

It's used in operating systems, compilers and CLIs.

The Cleavir Common Lisp compiler uses three-address instructions in a control-flow graph, though it is intended more for production use than educational use.

My best suggestion here would be clj-kondo with flycheck-clj-kondo in Emacs. I really can't recommend it enough and would have killed to have it when I was learning Clojure. Not only will it underline all of those references to (now) undefined vars, but it can tell you about numerous little mistakes like mixing up arguments orders in (say) sequence functions, misplaced docstrings that get discarded, style conventions, etc. It's staggering how good it is even for a language as dynamic as Clojure.

The clj-kondo linters are worth reading.

Sure!

Spec: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

Example (linter config): https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo/blob/634294183a0aa2ca...

Clj-kondo doesn't produce an AST but you could easily combine the analysis output with the AST produced by rewrite-clj by matching on location.

But if you want full support, you can implement a hook: https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo/blob/master/doc/hooks.md

Please configure and use tools like clj-kondo and kibit. Kibit will report areas where you could write idiomatic clojure instead. Eg, it should catch all those (if (condition) true false) and ask you to replace it with (condition). Or if you really need a boolean value, use boolean to coerce it.

Try clj-kondo, a Clojure linter which will tell you about arity errors and more, before you even evaluate your code.