one-more-re-nightmare VS babashka

Depends on your regex engine, and your non-regex solution. My engine (shameless self-plug https://github.com/telekons/one-more-re-nightmare) rivals hand-written automata, having to load each character more-or-less* only once, and throws in vectorisation for simple search loops too. I would not want to write or maintain the generated code.

one-more-re-nightmare used to let you write Σ, but I then tried to search Greek stuff with it and it went wrong. So now there's...$ for all characters (since that's not used for end-of-line assertions).

One trick is that Common Lisp can generate and compile code at runtime, whereas static languages typically do not have a compiler available at runtime. This lets you make your own lazy person's JIT/staged compiler, which is useful if some part of the problem is not known at compile-time. Such an approach has been used at least for array munging, type munging and regular expression munging.

> One of my favorite examples is the regex library cl-ppcre. Thanks to the nature of Lisp, the recognizer for each regex you create can be compiled to native code on compiler implementations of CL.

That is not true - cl-ppcre generates a chain of closures. Experimental performance is in the same ballpark as typical "bytecode" interpreting regex implementations.

(Disclosure: I wrote another regex library at <https://github.com/telekons/one-more-re-nightmare>, which does do native code compilation.)

Someone else didn't tell me that before, so it can't be true. But I don't publish papers on toys, nor do I think toy projects are awfully fast. Though the x86-64 backend I wrote was in someone else's repository and thus was several PRs :(

Regular expressions

Also try this https://github.com/telekons/one-more-re-nightmare

A Common Lisp system has the compiler around at runtime, so if you can figure out how to profitably stage/specialise a computation, then you can roll your own cheap JIT of sorts. This can be useful for array munging and regular expressions at the least. You can do this in C, of course but you would need to use another compiler as a library (e.g. LLVM, TCC, libgccjit) or write your own (e.g. PCRE2's sljit).

Agree to disagree - I don't have the energy to remember operator precedence. One file from the regular expression compiler has most of the rewrite rules I read from the papers, except in S-expression syntax. There were a few bugs due to misreading precedence. Also c.f. Gerald Sussman talking about physics notation being a pain in the butt.

It's all part of the library. Everything about regular expression types is in this file.

It also gives you access to Babashka if you want Clojure for other use-cases where start-up time is an issue

https://babashka.org/

I've tried researching this myself and can't find too much. There's this project metaes which is an mci for JS, and there's the SCI module of the Clojure babashka project, but that's about it. I also saw Triska's video on mci but it was pretty theoretical.

Created by the same guy who created babashka which is a way to write bash scripts, node scripts, and even apple scripts using Clojure. A very proficient and influential developer in the Clojure community. This is how borkduke's neil helps us:

Not what you asked for but there is Babashka for scripting in Clojure.

https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Clojure's lazy sequences by default are wonderful ergonomically, but it provides many ways to use strict evaluation if you want to. They aren't really a hassle either. I've been doing Clojure for the last few years and have a few grievances, but overall it's the most coherent, well thought out language I've used and I can't recommend it enough.

There is the issue of startup time with the JVM, but you can also do AOT compilation now so that really isn't a problem. Here are some other cool projects to look at if you're interested:

Malli: https://github.com/metosin/malli

Babashka: https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Clerk: https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk

Being a Clojure addict, I guess I have to leave the obligatory link to Babashka too then: https://github.com/babashka/babashka (Native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting)

which is now on hiatus. babashka: https://babashka.org

I've enjoyed babashka for scripting; which is close enough to clojure to allow using some/many libraries; but (probably) not for embedding.