generic-cl VS coalton

for those wanting generic +, equality and comparison in CL, there's a nice library: https://alex-gutev.github.io/generic-cl/

If performance is not a concern, then you can create CLOS classes corresponding to vec3 or mat44, and dispatch the appropriate functions from the generic-cl project by specializing on them.

> And Lisp is almost uniquely able to handle transitions to later standards as I described above. You don't actually have to forfeit backwards compatibility entirely or at all if the changes are handled by moving to a new default base package. :cl-user/:cl become :cl##-user/:cl##

Go use cl21[0] if you care for this sort of thing.

> more generic functions would open up more interesting developments later

generic-cl[1]. But in a prefix-oriented language, I just don't see this as particularly important.

> you don't necessarily want to bless a particular concurrency model

You do[2]; this is one of the notable deficiencies in the cl standard that really bites, today. It is being worked on.

0. http://cl21.org/

1. https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl

2. https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf

So, the article is harsh on CL: YMMV. Also, your goal may vary: I want to build and ship (web) applications, and so far Julia doesn't look attractive to me (at all). Super fast incremental development, build a standalone binary and deploy on my VPS or ship an Electron window? done. Problem(s) solved, let's focus on my app please.

The author doesn't mention a few helpful things:

- editor support: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... Emacs is first class, Portacle is an Emacs easy to install (3 clicks), Vim, Atom support is (was?) very good, Sublime Text seems good (it has an interactive debugger with stack frame inspection), VSCode sees good work underway, the Alive extension is new, usable but hard to install yet, LispWorks is proprietary and is more like Smalltalk, with many graphical windows to inspect your running application, Geany has simple and experimental support, Eclipse has basic support, Lem is a general purpose editor written in CL, it is Emacs-like and poorely documented :( we have Jupyter notebooks and simpler terminal-based interactive REPLs: cl-repl is like ipython.

So, one could complain five years ago easily about the lack of editor support, know your complaint should be more evolved than a Emacs/Vim dichotomy.

- package managers: Quicklisp is great, very slick and the ecosystem is very stable. When/if you encounter its limitations, you can use: Ultralisp, a Quicklisp distribution that ships every 5 minutes (but it doesn't check that all packages load correctly together), Qlot is used for project-local dependencies, where you pin each one precisely, CLPM is a new package manager that fixes some (all?) Quicklisp limitations

> [unicode, threading, GC…] All of these features are left to be implemented by third-party libraries

this leads to think that no implementation implements unicode or threading support O_o

> most of the language proper is not generic

mention generic-cl? https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/ (tried quickly, not intensively)

Documentation: fair points, but improving etc. Example of a new doc generator: https://40ants.com/doc/

Also I'd welcome a discussion about Coalton (Haskell-like type system on top of CL).

Does generic-cl work for you? In recent months, u/alex-gutev worked on it to separate it out into smaller subsystems.

Compared to generic-cls equality generic here: https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/blob/master/src/comparison/equality.lisp

Thanks for sharing. I'm planning to use it in static-dispatch to further optimize generic function calls in generic-cl. It's also used in the lisp-polymorph project, work in progress not yet completed, which aims to provide an extensible generic interface, though not based on generic functions, to functions in the Common Lisp standard, like generic-cl however built from the ground up with performance and optimization and performance in mind.

Release 0.5 adds a specialized implementation for SBCL which leverages the compiler's type inference engine, using DEFTRANSFORM, to allow for generic function inlining in a much broader range of scenarios. Any generic function call for which the types of the arguments can be determined by SBCL, can now be inlined by static-dispatch. This means even generic function calls with arguments consisting of complex expressions can be inlined. This also provides a performance boost for generic-cl where theoretically on SBCL, generic-cl:= should be equivalent in performance to cl:= in most cases where the type of the argument can be vaguely inferred by SBCL.

If you want to regain performance, add-in type declarations, cl-generic will inline its functions: https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/#optimization

This example makes me think of generic-cl: https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/#add-nary

It's still… not the same. In CL (and specially with SBCL), we get compile time (type) errors and warnings at the blink of an eye, when we compile a single function with a keystroke (typically C-c C-c in Slime).

And there's also been improvement, see Coalton for a ML on top of CL. (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/)

For the parenthetically inclined among us, there's also an implementation in Coalton: <https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/tree/main/examples/t...>

Common Lisp has bad marketing (even OCaml has Twitch streamers and "influencers" now), and bad support for general editors, both of which make it a non-starter for most curious people who have an afternoon to try something. But behind all that is magnificent activity for those who got over the initial potential energy barrier. Just to give some examples:

1. SBCL, the most popular open source implementation of Lisp, is seeing potentially two new garbage collectors. One of them is a parallel collector written by a university student (!!) which blows my mind.

2. SBCL has better and better support for deploying Liwp as a C-compatible shared library, using SBCL-LIBRARIAN. It makes it play nicer with other applications in C and Python.

3. Coalton is another exciting development that allows a Haskell type system and "Lisp-1" functional programming in Common Lisp. That means type classes (or traits), something Lisp hasn't really had a proper notion of, and full type inference. Persistent sequences based off of RRB-trees were recently merged, and interestingly, they're implemented purely in Coalton [1]. That means Clojure-like seqs.

It's interesting to see users of Lisp generating the above ideas and libraries, not a special in-group of committees, "official" developers, etc.

[1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/library/se...

Use an editor that auto-inserts parens and that indents the code correctly. Now nothing bad can happen. And the parens are used to edit code structurally.

re typing: Coalton brings Haskell-like typing on top of CL. https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ Other lisps are typed: typed racket, Carp… and btw, SBCL's compiler brings some welcome type warnings and errors (unlike Python, for instance).

If you like type safety, this project would be perfect for using https://coalton-lang.github.io/ so your REPL supported Common Lisp out of the gate.

Agree that you can use types to express and prove logical properties via compiler; it can be a fun way to solve a problem though too much of it tends to frustrate coworkers. It's also not exactly "low cost"; here's an old quip I have in my quotes file:

"With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map." --Daniel Worthington-Bodart

> On the contrary, they're still the most effective technique we've found for improving program correctness at low cost.

This is not borne out by research, such as there is any of any quality: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ The best intervention to improve correctness, if not already being done, is code review: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1120495752969641986 This doesn't necessarily mean dynamic types are better, just that if static types are better, they aren't tremendously so to obviously show in studies, unlike code review benefit studies.

My own bias is in favor of dynamic types, though I think the way Common Lisp does it is a lot better than Python (plus Lisp is flexible enough in other ways to let static type enthusiasts have their cake and eat it too https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton), and Python better than PHP, and PHP better than JS. Just like not all static type systems are C, not all dynamic type systems are JS. Untyped langs like assembly or Forth are interesting but I don't have enough experience.

I don't find the argument that valuable though, since I think just focusing on dynamic vs static is one of the least interesting division points when comparing languages or practices, and if we're trading experience takes I think Clojure's immutable-by-default prevents more bugs than any statically typed language that is mutable by default. It's not exactly a low cost intervention though, and when you really need to optimize you'll be encouraged by the profiler to replace some things with Java native arrays and so on. I don't think changing to static types would make a quality difference (especially when things like spec exist to get many of the same or more benefits) and would also not be a low cost intervention.

Last quip to reflect on. "What's true of every bug found in the field? ... It passed the type checker. ... It passed all the tests. Okay. So now what do you do? Right? I think we're in this world I'd like to call guardrail programming. Right? It's really sad. We're like: I can make change because I have tests. Who does that? Who drives their car around banging against the guardrail saying, "Whoa! I'm glad I've got these guardrails because I'd never make it to the show on time."" --Rich Hickey (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/)

Coalton seems great, I love the idea. This issue seems problematic, though: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/issues/84

> Lisps can be very flexible, but they usually lack static type safety, opening a wide and horrible door to run-time errors.

People should do basic research before writing something silly like this. Qualifying your statement with 'usually' is just a chicken sh*t approach. Common Lisp and Racket have optional strong typing, leaving the responsibility and choice to the developer. Common Lisp is great for implementing compilers. You also have thing like Typed Racket and Coalton. The latter is comletely statically typed ala MLTON

https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton

Have you checked out Coalton? It allows static typing a la Haskell within Common Lisp. Fully interoperable with CL, including through SLIME etc.

I've not regretted using Common Lisp for large, professional projects. However, I started Coalton so that some parts of a Common Lisp project can have strong, static, strict types—reaping benefits of compile-time errors and increased efficiency when I need it, without having to rewrite everything.