defstar VS awesome-cl

there is also https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar for providing more ergonomic type declarations inline in definitions

And this is another thing I'm not sure how to explain, I thought CL is surely more verbose and ugly than python for small scripts, but maybe it's macros will make it cleaner for building large systems. But then when I started writing actual programs, even small programs without any of my own macros, I generally use about 30% less LoC than in python... I've thought about making sly/slime like support for python (built on ipython with autoreload extension) or ruby (with it's fairly new low-overhead debug gem). But at the end of the day support for these things will always be incomplete and a hack compared to CL where it was designed from the start to support it, they run 20-100x slower than CL, and imo their runtime metaprogramming is harder to reason about than CL which is mostly compile time metaprogramming. When I've had to dig into some CL library, which is a lot more often than in those languages because it has 10000x fewer users so of course I will be first to run into some issue, it has generally been easy to understand what is going on and fix it, compared to large codebases in other languages.

Regarding "modern type-safe language", languages with expressive type systems, rust, ocaml, haskell, typescript, etc, can give really confusing type errors, when you get into generics and traits and more expressive stuff. I'm not convinced it's a better development experience than a dynamically typed languages where values have simple types, and when you get a type error you see the actual contents of the variable that is the wrong type and state of the program, at least in the case of CL where the stack isn't unwound on error and runtime is kind of compile-time as you're running all code as you write it. But mostly this sort of interactive development is very hard to implement in static languages, I'm not aware of any that does it. For example even in static langs like ocaml that have a repl through a bytecode interpreter, simple things don't work like say you pass some function as an event handler, and then update the function. As you passed efectively a function pointer to the old definition, rather than a symbol name like lisp, it will be calling the original function not the new version. But the main issue is that efficient staticly typed languages the type system is all at compile time, type information doesn't exist at runtime, which is great for performance, but means you don't get the ability to introspect on your running program like you do in CL and elixir, which personally I value more than full compile-time type checking.

Would I like some new language or heavy modification of existing language runtime that provides the best of everything? of course, but I also realize that it's a huge amount of work and won't happen with 10 years, while I can have a nice experience hacking away in CL and emacs right now. And ultimately CL is an extremely flexible language and I think it'll be less work to build on CL than to provide a CL like runtime for some other language. For example projects really pushing the edge there is Coalton described above. While personally I prefer dynamicly typed for general application programming I think Coalton could be great for compilers, parsing some protocol, or writing some subparts of your program in. And vernacular (https://github.com/ruricolist/vernacular) which explores bringing racket's lang and macro system to CL. For more standard CL code, using extremely common and widely used libraries like alexandria, serapeum, trivia, etc, already makes CL into a fairly modern and ergonomic language to write.

> both are dynamic languages with types added later in?

Common Lisp has always had types and type declarations (e.g. `the` in the hyperspec[1]) as it's part of the specification. It was not added later as far as I know.

However, `declaim` and `declare` were left very underspecified so they tend to be very implementation-specific, though there are libraries that make types more portable[2][3].

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/s_the....

[2] https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar

[3] https://github.com/ruricolist/serapeum/blob/master/REFERENCE...

Like defstar? https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar Type declarations that you can place inside the defun. Also serapeum:-> (atop the defun). Or Coalton: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ But it's possible you'll feel much less a need for that in CL.

Hi, if you plan to work on enhancing the library (glad to here!): you can fork the repository to your github username, decide that you will be able to maintain for the foreseeable future and ask Quicklisp to point defstrar to your repository. You can create a defstar org on github, so you could easily give push access to future maintainers. Or, you could ask for write access here: https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar it's an un-official org that I created in the hope to maintain orphan projects collectively. You can send PRs or ask for push access. There is no current maintainer for this project, it is not pointed to by QL, it is only a Github mirror. Best,

agreed^^ there are macros and libraries to bring a nicer syntax (of course). Exple: https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar

   (defun\* (sum -> real) ((a real) (b real))

I know you're not asking for recommendations, but Lisp, particularly SBCL, really seems to check all your boxes. I say this as someone who generally reaches for Scheme when it comes to Lisps too.

There are a few game engines[0] for CL, but most of them seem to be catered specifically to 2D games.

[0] https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl?tab=readme-ov-fil...

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.