cffi VS paip-lisp

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.

PAIP by Peter Norvig, Chapter 23, Compiling Lisp

https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter23...

Emacs is so much more than a text editor! But I need to stay on topic...

I believe your assessment of LISP (and therefore of MacArthy)'s impact on AI to be unfair. Just a few days ago https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp was discussed on this site, for example.

Sounds like a great project idea to make a toy demo of this direction you'd like to see. Maybe comparable to https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter15... and https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter8.... which are a few hundred lines of Lisp each, but do enough to be interesting.

You could look into Paradigms of AI Programming by Peter Norvig which might interest you regardless of Lisp content.

Lisp has great power, examine PAIP, part II chapters 7 and 8.

A computer running Prolog reasons, and that only requires a couple of pages of code. So it seems feasible that the network could have learned some ability to reason within its network.

IMHO it's because lisp shines to manipulate symbols whereas the current AI trend is crunching matrices.

When AI was about building grammars, trees, developing expert systems builds rules etc. symbol manipulation was king. Look at PAIP for some examples: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

This paradigm has changed.

Origen: Conversación con Bing, 4/4/2023(1) gigamonkey/monkeylib-binary-data - GitHub. https://github.com/gigamonkey/monkeylib-binary-data Con acceso 4/4/2023. (2) paip-lisp/chapter4.md at main · norvig/paip-lisp · GitHub. https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter4.md Con acceso 4/4/2023. (3) bibliography.md · GitHub. https://gist.github.com/gigamonkey/6151820 Con acceso 4/4/2023.

If anyone is interested PAIP is downloadable at https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp