clog VS awesome-cl

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.

Hello, a single counter-example I hope https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

(see more from https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl?tab=readme-ov-fil...

https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html

and some more)

Everyone, if you don't have a clue on how's Common Lisp going these days, I suggest:

https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li... (https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/107oejk/these_years_i...)

A curated list of libraries: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

Some companies, the ones we hear about: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/

and oh, some more editors besides Emacs or Vim: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... (Atom/Pulsar support is good, VSCode support less so, Jetbrains one getting good, Lem is a modern Emacsy built in CL, Jupyter notebooks, cl-repl for a terminal REPL, etc)

check out the editor section, there's more than Emacs these days: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

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

- https://www.classcentral.com/report/best-lisp-courses/#ancho...

- a recent overview of the ecosystem: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-li... (shameless plug, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321090)

More HTML generators for CL: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl#html-generators-a... there are lispy ones (Spinneret), Django-like ones (Djula, I like it, easy to use and extend), HTML-based allowing for inline Lisp code (Ten), JSX-like ones (lsx, markup), and more.

https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl is usually a good place to find recommendations. Jzon is pretty good.

> obstacles add up

I actually agree. It wasn't smooth for me to ship my first CL app. It's all better now (more tools, more documentation, more blog posts from several people, more SO questions and answers!).

> performant

SBCL is in the same ballpack of C, Rust or Java in many benchmarks.

In this article series, the author writes the same program in CL, Rust and Java. In fact, he copy-pastes a PG snippet from 30 years ago. This snippet beats Rust and Java in LOC and speed. But, yeah, he wasn't writing super efficient Rust code, so after many discussions, pull requests and sweating, the Rust code became the most performant. https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... It didn't take work to make the CL code performant, more so for the Rust one ;)

a benchmark after sb-simd vectorization: https://preview.redd.it/vn5juu36v2681.png?width=715&format=p... (https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/riedio/quite_a...)

> good tools for networking, for writing concurrent or asynchronous code, for graphics,

I refer the reader to https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl but yes, CL won't have the best libraries in some scenarii (GUI? Tk libs are good, we have Gtk4, a Qt5 library used in production© by a big player but difficult to install etc)

> it doesn't give you a good package manager or means of distributing code

Quicklisp is neat, with limitations, that can be addressed with Qlot, ql-https, or CLPM or the newest ocicl.

It's a good book!

Modern companions would be:

- the Cookbook: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ (check out the editors section: Atom/Pulsar, VSCode, Sublime, Jetbrains, Lem...)

- https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl to find libraries

Also:

- https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321090 2022 in review

> 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

https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp -- this one is great, and the first thing I recommend

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ -- also great and up to date

https://awesome-cl.com/ -- for anything else.

I also recommend https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl, a curated list of libraries.