Our great sponsors
-
Common Lisp is awesome. SBCL is fast, there are a lot of decent libraries (https://awesome-cl.com/), and you can use it immediately in production. Lisp REPL-centric development requires some adjustment, and basically you don't have other IDE options besides Emacs with Slime or Sly, but Common Lisp was the reason I finally learned how to live with Emacs.
-
Join me vim brother and don't settle for forcing yourself to use emacs while developing in CL when you don't have to! You even have two vim options! https://github.com/kovisoft/slimv and https://github.com/vlime/vlime with a great comparison of the two: https://susam.net/blog/lisp-in-vim.html
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
Right, it's fine, and is a pretty basic macro. Doubly linked lists are pretty basic data structures too, even the Rust versions once you figure it out. I like your sibling comment making it look like the CL version. I still want to know in more detail though why you think that doing things this way instead of the CL way is less likely to be "fragile and break down" for the complicated stuff, it would help to have a specific complicated example to showcase. Perhaps the linked https://github.com/disconcision/fructure in another comment would be a good study? The author there claimed they might not have been able to manage with defmacro, maybe someone familiar with both could articulate the challenges in detail. Is it just an issue of some things benefit a lot from pattern matching, and if so, does using CL's Trivia system mitigate that at all (in the same way that using gensym+packages+Lisp-2ness can mitigate hygiene issues)?
-
I have an article I wrote about how I did this, but may have lost it to time.
The short version is I have SLIME running inside Emacs, and my text files open in vim. I would just reload the changed file(s) when needed (originally with cl:load-file, then later with asdf, which is roughly "make" for lisp). I used slime similarly to how I would use gdb. It was a big improvement over using vim with the clisp[1] REPL both because SLIME was more powerful than the clisp repl, and because it worked with other implementations like CMU CL (which sbcl now is a fork of).
I mostly just used the menus for interacting with emacs, but since the shortcuts are listed beside commands, I did learn the more commonly used ones.
I continued like this for years until I discoveredevil-mode[2], which was the first thing close enough to vim to be usable for me (and even then I had to add a few keybindings that it was missing).
1: clisp is a specific implementation of common lisp, not an abbreviation
-
Graal
GraalVM compiles Java applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀
A document that puts these differences in context is Rich Hickey's "A History of Clojure"
https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd...
The design decisions in this paper strongly resonate with me. It helped me to overcome my aversion to JVM-hosted languages, and settle down to learn Clojure.
I'm a research mathematician, at one extreme where code is steps up a mountain. I don't need to summit twice, so productivity is far more important than speed. Nevertheless, the fastest Clojure time trials use GraalVM:
-
Join me vim brother and don't settle for forcing yourself to use emacs while developing in CL when you don't have to! You even have two vim options! https://github.com/kovisoft/slimv and https://github.com/vlime/vlime with a great comparison of the two: https://susam.net/blog/lisp-in-vim.html
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
To provide a bit more context, most of SLIME is just Common Lisp code (https://github.com/slime/slime), with a bunch of Emacs Lisp code alongside to support interfacing with Emacs. But you don't need that Emacs Lisp code to take advantage of almost all of the functionality SLIME provides. For instance, if you want to know who-calls a function, there's some command in emacs to do it, but all that command is doing is just a bit of elisp code which sends a message to Swank (a server running inside Common Lisp) and Swank invokes some native CL code to figure that out and return the results, then finally a bit of elisp code presents the results in some way. Vim can do the same thing just fine with vimscript/python (what the Slimv plugin uses) or otherwise, the bulk of the work in figuring out the list of callers of some function is done by the CL code (and CL implementation itself).
-
I have a project to do that, https://github.com/ruricolist/vernacular, although I'm not working on it right now.
-
More to the point of how simple (and easy) defmacro is compared to syntax-case and syntax-rules, I like another fare post: https://fare.livejournal.com/189741.html If you're as smart as fare, it "isn't too hard to translate it".
Though I concede this case could be analogous to trying to write a Doubly Linked List in Rust. So I'd more like to see a concrete case you have in mind where the tradeoffs are squarely against CL. Like, the loop macro is more complicated than any I have written myself, but you can break it down, and it's not that bad -- I think Norvig's version is pretty neat to study: https://norvig.com/paip/loop.lisp This project (and it's not the only one!) adding C syntax to CL https://github.com/y2q-actionman/with-c-syntax I think is more complicated than loop, and is sort of where I'd put the level of "complicated things" at that I'd like to see an example from the Scheme world that clearly shows defmacro's deficiencies on some metrics. (Fewer bugs? Easier to add new features to? Shorter code? Faster performance either at compile time or runtime or both? Easier to understand or faster to implement for people with similar levels of skill in the language?)
-
https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp - Peter Norvig's Paradigm's of AI Programming
https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/search?l=Markdown&q=defm... - all references to defmacro in the markdown files
Chapter 3 shows a simple macro, just adding a while loop to the language.
Chapter 9 shows some more complex ones, including a with- macro and a grammar compiler macro.
Chapters 11 and 12 show the development of a Prolog implementation in CL using defmacro to aid in compilation again in Chapter 11.
Chapter 12 shows adding an OO system to the language. Technically not needed with CLOS, but a good demonstration of what can be done with macros.
There are other examples (why I included that search link). Macros let you change the language in ways large and small. Many uses could probably be replaced with functions, though you'd end up having to throw a bunch of quotes about or closures in order to delay processing things.
