netfarm VS doc

/u/read-eval-print-loop and I wrote GitLab CI testing configs, though I don't know how much relates to Jenkins. The general recipe is that one starts with an environment with SBCL (and Clozure and any other implementations you want to test on), clones in extra libraries if necessary, and then loads a short file which then loads the test suite, runs it, and exits with an appropriate status code, which the CI (presumably Jenkins too?) uses to produce a status to report.

Tests for the Netfarm suite and Minecraft mostly.

I threw TLA+ at a few fine-grained locking algorithms I wrote. Here is one such model. The actual implementation is more complex than the model, in particular because the real implementation of this code handles multiple concurrent resource requests, but they are "independent" enough that I can probably just prove a model with just one resource; and, as Lamport said once, the model code doesn't have to be particuarly well optimized, whereas if you are breaking locks, you probably have substantially optimized already.

I work on a metacircular Common Lisp implementation, which makes for a very boring answer. In the next closest thing to a job, I use CL for just about the whole network stack, so really anything would be suitable. But I wouldn't dare throwing a new language into a workplace, and I am not sure how much they would appreciate it.

One very niche "counter-example" is a system where loading files causes side effects, which must occur in some order. This happens in the Netfarm object system implementation, where most of the bootstrapping steps occur in an early system definition and a late system definition. In this case it is not enough to compute the dependency tree; it is necessary to pick a very specific ordering for things to not break.

Alexandria, yes, anaphora, not anymore. I do have a fairly large utility package for decentralise2, but it mainly handles concurrency and debugging things.

If it's not distributed under the Cooperative Software License, I don't want it dirtying up my CPU.

- it is possible to subscribe on the changes using RSS (this is a feature of the 40ANTS-DOC documentation builder).

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).

Great news! Feedback: I guess it's time to start working on documentation ;) The readme doesn't say what the system does. I guess you could maintain a high overview "manually", and in parallel set up a documentation system (40ants doc is kinda cool). Best,

- and 40ANTS-DOC builder.

That is why I've put about half of this year into the Common Lisp documentation generator for all of my libraries.

If you are interested, please read it's docs and join the effort of making good documentation for CL projects: https://40ants.com/doc/

And the doc is built with the new https://40ants.com/doc 🎉 Really cool.