Show HN: A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF

[andreamonaco]

Implementation of the standard is still not complete, but breakpoints and stepping work quite well! It also has some support for watchpoints, that no implementation has.

Now it ships with ASDF and is capable of loading systems!

Let me know if you like it. Support on Patreon or Liberapay is much appreciated

[danilor]

Hey I'm curious as why you chose nongnu to host your project instead of github/gitlab! I don't know much about it, hence my curiosity ;)

[andreamonaco]

I don't like sites with heavy Javascript, especially if it's non-free. (Though recently I started using Github for a different project.)

Savannah is very basic, perhaps too much, but it's okay for my project.

[kazinator]

I hosted the TXR git on nongnu first, starting at around late 2009 or early 2010 maybe?

I abandoned that when I discovered there's no control. I seem to recall having to wait like over a week for someone to enable non-fast-forward pushes. Overly strict and understaffed. I opted for self hosting.

I kept the project web page there, though.

[volemo]

Tbh, this is the first time I see nongnu.org used for something other than Emacs packages (I know that’s on me), so much so that I even thought this was a solution to substitute Emacs Lisp with Common Lisp. :O

[badmonster]

+1

[whartung]

At what point does a CL implementation need to be before it can start hoovering up the available library code from other implementations (license permitting).

How many LOOP macros does the community need, particularly when bootstrapping an implementation, as an example.

Similarly with, arguably 70-80% of the runtime. The CL spec is dominated by the large library which, ideally, should be mostly portable CL, at least I would think.

[klibertp]

You're not the first one to think so: https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL

I'm unsure how complete it is, but it seems to cover much of the standard.

[g2963]

a hypothetical portable layer exists, but it starts diverging once deployed, because of cleanups, refactoring, or implementation specific hacks.

LOOP is a great example, because all loop is just MIT LOOP version 829, originally cleaned up by burke. but nobody can resist deploying their personal architectural touch, so while the basic framework of loop remains identical across impelementations, there's superficial refactoring done by pretty much everyone. if you take SBCL and franz lisp as state of the art in free software and commercial respectivaly, they have equally solid improvements on original loop, that actually produce incompatible behavior in underspecified corners of spec. respective developer communities are very defensive about their incompatible behavior being the correct behavior of course. beach's SICL from sibling comment is the xkcd joke about standards "20 standards? we need a new standard the unifies them all! -- now we have 21 standards"

LOOP in this case is a very simple example, but for example CLOS was originally implemented on top of PCL, Portable CommonLoops, an interlisp system, that was massaged into being compliant CLOS over years. for example sbcl uses a ship of theseus PCL, but franz lisp did from scratch rewrite. the hypothetical portability of that layer is significantly trickier than LOOP since clos is is deeply tied to the type system, and the boundary between some hypothetical base system common lisp and its clos layer becomes complicated during system bootstrapping. but that's not all! of course clos has to be deeply tied to the compiler, the type system, all kinds of things, to provide optimizations. discovering the appropriate slicing boundary is difficult to say the least.

[WalterGR]

> a debugger with stepping, a feature that most free CL implementations lack.

I think most free CL implementations have a stepper. Which ones do not?

[andreamonaco]

I tried stepping in various free implementations, but I couldn't really follow the source forms and execute them one by one. Also, I couldn't find much information online. Maybe your experience is different?

[eadmund]

Congratulations! Always good to see another Lisp in the world.

Have you thought about writing up your experience?

[andreamonaco]

Also, my Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/andreamonaco) has behind-the-scenes posts, some even in the free tier

[andreamonaco]

Thanks! Maybe I could do that, if I see that people are interested

[nexo-v1]

Out of curiosity, what influenced your decision to prioritize stepping and watchpoints early? Was it driven more by debugging your own compiler code, or anticipating end-user needs

[andreamonaco]

I'd say the latter, since I felt the need for debugging tools similar to other languages like C. Watchpoints for example are entirely non-existent in current implementations, as far as I know

[badmonster]

Does alisp plan to eventually support full compilation to native code, or will it mainly stay an interpreter with limited compilation?

[andreamonaco]

Yeah, the goal is first bytecode compilation and then full

[neonscribe]

Do you have a goal in mind for this project?

[andreamonaco]

Ideally I'd reach ANSI compliance, first with a bytecode compiler and then with a full one

[CleverLikeAnOx]

What is ASDF?

[mikedelago]

ASDF - another system definition facility - is the de facto standard build system for common lisp.

https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/

In common lisp, you don't need a build system at all; you can `(load "file.lisp")` everything and it should generally just work. But of course, build systems are useful tools, so nonetheless ASDF exists and it's nice enough to the degree that nobody has built a better and more widespread common lisp build system.

Some good trivial examples are in the lisp cookbook:

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/systems.html

[alexjplant]

No idea why you're being downvoted for asking a simple question about an acronym. From Wikipedia [1]:

> ASDF (Another System Definition Facility) is a package format and a build tool for Common Lisp libraries. It is analogous to tools such as Make and Ant.

Contemporary developers using more mainstream languages are likely more familiar with asdf [2], the "Multiple Runtime Version Manager".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_System_Definition_Faci...

[2] https://asdf-vm.com/

[andreamonaco]

I'm not sure I understand. What I do in my project is very common practice: generated files (like the configure script) are not part of the repository, but they are put in released tarballs

[valorzard]

I would be excited to use but since it’s using GPLv3 I can’t actually use it for a lot of projects I’d want to make ;-; Is it possible to relicense to LGPL or MPL instead?

[kstrauser]

In general, people who license something as GPLv3 probably consider that a feature, not a bug.

I mentioned here recently that I released a personal project under the GPLv3. The very first issue someone filed in GitHub was to ask me to relicense it as something more business friendly. I don't think I've been so offended by an issue before. If I'm writing something for fun, I could not possibly be less interested in helping else someone monetize my work. They can play by Free Software rules, or they can write their own version for themselves and license it however they want. I don't owe them the freedom to make it un-Free.

The fact that this is hosted on a FSF-managed service indicates the author likely sees it similarly.

[-__---____-ZXyw]

Hard to believe this comment could be serious, but nonetheless, for the impartial observers, there is a healthy ecosystem of Common Lisp implementations, from "permissive" open source all the way to (expensive) commercial, proprietary ones.

https://common-lisp.net/implementations

I think a full-featured GPLv3 implementation would be very cool, personally.