Lisp: it's not about macros, it's about READ (2012)

Re:Lisp: it's not about macros, it's about READ (2012) by aidenn0 on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @10:55PM (#12126559)

I think VM image saving/loading is still debatable as to whether or not it's good, assuming that it's the primary way of generating a binary image, as it is in most lisps.

A lot more work has to go into guaranteeing reproducible builds, and it tends to be a fairly non-compact representation of your executable. If CL were a little bit less customizable at load-time, that would allow for much faster FASL loading, which in turn would make the reliance on saved-images less important.

Obviously there are uses for that feature, and having a feature doesn't by itself make a language worse, but when that feature is a square-peg, but still the best fit for a particular round-hole, it causes problems.

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Re:Lisp: it's not about macros, it's about READ (2012) by mbrock on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @11:33AM (#12129806)

I found it pretty easy to generate images in a reproducible way: just load your packages, run whatever setup you want, then save the image. Compactness hasn't been a problem for me but I suppose it could be. Admittedly I don't have much real experience with deploying Lisp applications in any serious way; I'm curious about what problems people run into.

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Re:Lisp: it's not about macros, it's about READ (2012) by aidenn0 on Thursday July 21, 2016 @09:44AM (#12136750)

Have you read any of the XCVB papers? They dig deeper into the issues with generating reproducible images, in particular with parallel builds.

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