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Portability across Lisp dialects is usually not a thing. Even Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp which are arguably pretty close rarely if ever share code.

You could make a frontend for dialect A to run code from dialect B. Those things have been toyed with, but never really took off. E.g. cl in Emacs can not accept real Common Lisp code.

I'm not arguing against the idea, I'm just curious how it would work because I see no realistic way to do it.

discuss

notpushkin|23 days ago

Gotcha. Too bad – I was hoping there was at least some (non-trivial) subset you can run on both :(

Any idea why is it not a thing? Is this level of interop not practical for some reason?

larsbrinkhoff|23 days ago

Lisp dialects have diverged quite a bit, and it would be a lot of work to bridge the differences to a degree approaching 100%. 90% is easy, but only works for small trivial programs.

I say this, having written a "95%" Common Lisp for Emacs (still a toy), and successfully ran an old Maclisp compiler and assembler in Common Lisp.

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-cl

https://github.com/PDP-6/ITS-138/blob/master/tools/maclisp.l...