cl-gserver VS Akka.net

> static strong typing

Alright, here is it: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/

> small efficient native binaries

The numbers are: with SBCL's core-compression, a web app with dozens on dependencies will weight ±30 to 40MB. This includes the compiler, the debugger, etc. Without core compression, we reach ±150MB.

> The actor runtime?

the actor library: https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver

> couldn't find a way to make money with it. I suspect many other programmers are in my boat.

Alright. Some do, that's life. Yes, some companies go with CL even in 2023 (https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/, they released https://github.com/KinaKnowledge/juno-lang lately; Feetr (finance): https://twitter.com/feetr_io/status/1587182923911991303)

https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

> Give us an HTTP (1.x & 2.0) and WebSockets libraries

How so? We have those libraries. HTTP/2: https://github.com/zellerin/http2/

https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

It's nice to see the CL ecosystem evolving. SBCL sees regular updates with new optimizations. The editor support is getting better: [Vim, Atom, Sublime, VSCode… have good to very good support](https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...), & Jupyter notebook, the Lem editor… and a new lisper started a CL editor based on Tauri: [Parrot](https://github.com/fonol/parrot). Cool projects emerge ([lisp-stats](https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/lisp-stat/), the [Sento / cl-gserver](https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver) actors library, the Kons-9 3D graphics library, the CLOG web-gui…)

> 50MB

With compression (zstd now), SBCL binaries weigh ±25MB. Start-up time is super fast. I built a standalone binary for my web app, it is straightforward to start it on the background and access it from an Electron window.

what's nice in CL is that we can choose. We have a nice actor-style library now (https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver).

You might be interested in cl-gserver0.

Version 1.9 of cl-gserver adds low weight timeouts for async ask operations with the help of timer wheels. https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver

Have a look at the tests here: https://github.com/mdbergmann/cl-gserver/blob/master/tests/hash-agent-test.lisp

I have seen cl-gearman used in the wild (for example for Ultralisp), there is lfarm (distributing work across machines, on top of lparallel and usocket), "jobs" and "workers" makes me think cl-gserver (Erlang-inspired GenServer, actors pattern)… not really answering, throwing ideas in case you didn't see them, and furnish this discussion a bit :]

akka.net actors. Actors all the way! https://getakka.net

If it's the former you may want to take a look at something like the actor model akka.net with persistent actors (https://getakka.net/articles/persistence/architecture.html). No need of an external message broker or mass transit (which is a wrapper over different message brokers). You could use sqllite for persisting the actors state to recover in case of a restart.

Spring and Hibernate are the goto libraries in Java land and I suspect that's the primary motivation for your colleague's recommendations. It's quite easy to bulldoze someone less experienced with your ideas so be careful of that. I'd avoid both. They aren't bad libraries at all but they have a 'legacy' feel and it will make your application less future proof. Would a distributed system be viable? If so then I'd recommend Akka, there'a .NET port of it that's well supported and maintained.

Is akka a good alternative?

However, I've found that sometimes, they are a little -too- functional. I'm a bit more preferential to Akka.Net's implementation of Option and Try, if only because they have good 'escape hatches' where you interrogate them in a more procedural manner.

This project is also what ultimately led to the creation of Akka.NET - I wrote an overview on how our application was built here: https://aaronstannard.com/markedup-akkadotnet/

You may also want to take a look at queues (e.g. RabbitMQ) or even something like Akka.NET or Microsoft Orleans.

From the title I immediately thought AKKA.NET or Orleans