cffi VS clog

When you want to do anything that breaks the nice bubble of your Lisp image, you might want to know a bit about your operating system's programming interface. This will come in handy if you ever need to wrap a library with CFFI. There are some things that are pretty inconvenient as a rule (like dealing with any protocol that uses network byte order), but if you stay within the bubble of your Lisp image, you won't really notice them.

I'm just posting the work that I have done over the last year or so on CL-Objc. I'm still blocked from better support (e.g., passing structs by value for frameworks like UIKit). I just wanted to post what I have done online for others interested in the work or motivated to collaborate on this.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I have been waiting on some feedback for PR in CFFI. This feature is blocking me from reviving CL-OBJC. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Is that actually https://github.com/cffi/cffi/commit/33970351e71bb5f12ba56fc40270089e948ae112 ? I.e. after loading cl+ssl. (Although Hunchentoot does not interrupt threads)

Maybe access the pins using CFFI, https://github.com/cffi/cffi package and one the libraries mentioned here? https://www.bigmessowires.com/2018/05/26/raspberry-pi-gpio-programming-in-c/

FTR, on my system QL fetches CFFI 0.23.0 and the fix/error I'm talking about is https://github.com/cffi/cffi/blob/master/src/libraries.lisp#L106 and seems to have been added iin this PR https://github.com/cffi/cffi/pull/173/commits/263b38f4f2600dbacde8f2b313620c35a563c6df so the fix should be in CFFI 0.24.0 released 24 March 2021.

FTR: this is the PR https://github.com/cffi/cffi/pull/173/commits/263b38f4f2600dbacde8f2b313620c35a563c6df

C: Alternatively (more difficult) you could try to wrap the underlying C layers of either of those mentioned under Python with CFFI. The C-based game engine, Raylib, is also wrappable this way. I finished a super cool walking simulator in CL with that, but it is more tedious than the others since raylib is really barebones.

I feel inspired to start Lisp after being disappointed with the "open" source scene of 2021. I'd rather pay LispWorks a yearly fee and be left alone than dealing with unbalanced people in the Python space. The free Lisp implementations also look somewhat isolated from the ideological wars.

However, a C interface is required. Is this one the recommended solution? Is it really portable?

https://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/

What is the speed compared to a Python C extension? Are implementation-specific C interfaces faster (I guess they are)?

Sorry for so many questions, but these can usually only be answered by people who have actually used the interface.

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.