biwascheme VS clog

If Scheme is something you enjoy, BiwaScheme's interpreter can be instantiated from within Javascript and can be used to evaluate Scheme code.

https://www.biwascheme.org/

This project is very exciting. In the meantime, there are a couple of options:

BiwaScheme: https://www.biwascheme.org/

Advantages: written in JavaScript, with excellent JS interop. Project has some history.

Disadvantages: slower than S7 (though still plenty fast for many uses), less-complete (e.g., no syntax-rules or syntax-case, though it does have its own define-macro).

S7 Scheme: https://cm-gitlab.stanford.edu/bil/s7

Written in C, but can be transpiled to WASM (see https://github.com/actonDev/s7-playground/ )

Advantages: This project also has some history. Considerably faster than BiwaScheme.

Disadvantages: JS interop is clumsier (basically the same issues as JS interop with any WASM code... this could probably be mitigated considerably if someone wanted to take the time).

For Scheme implementations there are LIPS and biwascheme. I haven't done more than play around with them, so I can't really give an informed opinion about pros and cons or favorites.

I used to have hundreds of open tabs. From there I kept repurposing it to do more stuff with the browser until it reached its current state, where I want to make it a "extend firefox from Emacs" thing. It kinda do that already, but extending the firefox-extension itself require the extension to be re-built (so you need whole javascript tooling, rebuild and reload the addon etc). I am considering adding something like biwascheme to it soon to work around that.

And then users can just use biwascheme and run programs in mainframes and their smart toasters

Languages like Biwa Scheme and LIPS Scheme are good for running Scheme in the browser. But I would prefer compiling Scheme code to JavaScript in the server, then serving the compiled JavaScript image to the browser.

Just a note that even BiwaScheme doesn't fully implement call/cc, it doesn't save the whole environment when capturing.

Very cool! Do you know how this compares with Biwascheme? https://www.biwascheme.org/

Biwascheme has some weird scoping bugs that makes me a litte afraid of using it for serious stuff. It seems nixe and all, but this: https://github.com/biwascheme/biwascheme/issues/125 is not very confidemce inspiring.

There is another schemey language that compiles to JS that accepts things like this:

    (when (start-are-aligned?)

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

For me David Botton [0] with his work including code, support and videos is doing very nice work in this direction.

I use SBCL for everything but work because I cannot get; we are getting there, but like you say, it’s such a nice experience working interactively building fast that it is magic and it’s painful returning to my daily work of Python and typescript/react. It feels like a waste of time/life, really.

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

I was following along on the Windows page and didn't check back on the main README to see if any of the other instructions would help.

It the answer is "latter", then you could look at Common Lisp and Reblocks (https://40ants.com/reblocks/) or CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog).

I haven't used Clojure professionally in 10 years so with a grain of salt here are my thoughts as only one other person answered...

CL over Clojure: it's the OG Lisp that the creator of Clojure used and wanted to continue using but faced too much resistance from management afraid of anything not-Java/not-Oracle, or not-CLR/not-Microsoft, etc. Clojure shipped originally as "just another jar" so devs could "sneak" it in. If you don't have such a management restriction, why Clojure? If you want to integrate CL with the JVM, you can use the ABCL implementation, there's also something from one of the proprietary Lisps. Some useful CL features that are nice in this domain: conditions and restarts mentioned in a sibling comment (very nice to help interactively develop/debug e.g. a selenium webdriver test), ability to easily compile an exe (perhaps useful for microservices, or just to keep your deployment environment clean and not having to care about Lisp), and ability to easily ship with an open local socket allowing you to SSH in (or SSH port forward) and debug/fix/poke around in production (JVM of course lets you attach debuggers to a running process, even certain billion+ dollar companies will have supervised/limited prod debugging sessions for various hairy cases, but it's not as interactive). You should never hear CL advocates claim you can't scale to large teams/groups of engineers or large multi-million-lines sized projects, though you might oddly hear Clojure advocates sometimes claim you can't (and shouldn't) scale to such large projects -- large groups of engineers are a non-issue for them as well though, the challenge is in hiring, not in the language somehow making it impossible to modularize and keep people from stepping on each other.

Clojure over CL: its integration with the JVM is nicer than ABCL's, so if you do actually want a lot of the great world of Java stuff, it's easier to get at. Database integration libraries are better. Access to libs (Clojure or Java) is via Maven, so it's a larger ecosystem with more self-integrating components (especially around monitoring/metrics) than what's available for Lisp via Quicklisp. Clojure is very opinionated, much of it quite tasteful, and that gives the whole ecosystem a certain consistency. (You can have immutable data structures in CL, you can if you want use [] for literal vectors and make them syntactically important e.g. in let bindings, but not everyone will be on board.) Even though its popularity seems to have stopped growing, at least at the same rate as e.g. Go which it was keeping pace with for a while, it's still popular enough with a bigger community; as a proxy measure there are multiple conferences around the world and good talks at adjacent conferences, whereas Lisp mostly just has one conference in Europe per year and only occasional branching outside of that.

If you're doing a client-side-heavy webapp, ClojureScript is still amazing, CL's answers there aren't very compelling with the exception of CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog) which takes an entirely different direction than the usual idea of translating/running Lisp on top of JavaScript and its popular frameworks.