magicl VS generic-cl

(Link didn't work for me)

https://github.com/quil-lang/magicl/blob/master/src/high-lev...

use MAGICL. [1] It is optionally and transparently accelerated by BLAS/LAPACK.

[1] https://github.com/quil-lang/magicl/blob/master/doc/high-lev...

Maybe have a look at how magicl does this?

This is essentially the first option, which is already supported by MAGICL by loading MAGICL/EXT-LAPACK [1].

[1] https://github.com/quil-lang/magicl#extensions

I think what the magicl team has done is brilliant - allowing multiple implementations is awesome.

Second up is magicl, especially useful if performance is a concern. This might not be as extensive as numcl, but it's been battle tested in the industry over the last decade or so. Because this uses generic functions, so long as you are using not-very-small arrays, performance should not be a concern for you. And even if you are, you could write your own functions that use the low-level functions that magicl's backends define. Otherwise performance can be at par with numpy.

I agree... and I do don't want be the person who has not rallied. I just took a look at guicho's issue from 2019. And here, you yourself have admitted that the high level interface is less than ideal and needs more work. However, the very point that magicl is an industry standard could imply that potentially radical backward-incompatible changes can be hard. But, honestly, I want to discuss this, time permitting!

Common Lisp is a great language to build new tools for data science, but currently has pretty awful library support existing data science workflows. Common Lisp is sorely lacking in high-quality statistics, plotting, and sparse arrays. There’s been a long work-in-progress library to bring flexible and high-performance linear algebra to Lisp, but it needs more contributors.

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.

Anyway, this library is inspired by https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl and provides polymorphic versions of many common standard functions based on types. For example, now `>` and `<` work on characters and strings as well, and `at` is a universal by-key accessor for all data structures (`aref` + `nth` + `gethash` + some more). It also tries to be as strictly typed as possible, resulting in compile-time errors/warnings in case types are mismatched. Types do not always need to be declared, they can be inferred thanks to excellent https://github.com/alex-gutev/cl-form-types by Alex Gutev. Besides that it includes a collection of useful macros for more "typey" style of coding as well as several data structures I consider missing from the standard. The structures are templated -- which means there's a structure type generated for each contained element-type.

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.