lisp-interface-library VS generic-cl

What are your thoughts on the Lisp Interface Library? I recognize that it doesn't cover some of your use cases since LIL is designed in a dynamic manner and does not provide the sort of compile-time type shenanigans that coalton can. Just from the standpoint of providing parametric polymorphism though, dynamic or not, what do you think of it?

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