Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by aerique on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @04:27AM
(#15079618)
You are correct, but why is this a problem in the case mentioned by the author?
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Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by farray on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @07:01AM
(#15080365)
Executing fasls is cool, but they will start from a new empty image, and loading fasls is actually kind of slow, so if you use lots of libraries rather than write a trivial example, that may consume hundreds of milliseconds before the program actually starts. Then again, this supposes you compiled everything into a single .fasl (which ASDF makes easy). But that will be a big fasl for each program; if you want to load from libraries, then there's also the overhead of setting up and using ASDF itself, which can also be in the hundreds of milliseconds. I can imagine many ways to improve the situation, but none are cheap (e.g. implement a background daemon to serve ready executables and/or watch the source registry for modified source; or break compatibility with the entire ASDF setup, angrying the entire community).
Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by CaptObvious2 on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:17AM
(#15096287)
It's still too big, too slow [compared to gerbil] and uses a lot more memory. Gambit GC is amazingly fast, and never tenures garbage to a gen where it will collect like SBCL tends to do on many workloads. [acl/ccl/lw do not have this issue, although they are slower than sbcl]
Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by lottin on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @04:52AM
(#15079729)
It's not necessarily a problem, but personally for small utilities I much prefer something that supports #!-style scripts, like Guile or Racket, or that can be compiled into small, efficient executables. Let's say it's a matter of personal preference.
Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by farray on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @06:50AM
(#15080290)
I wrote cl-launch so you can use #!/usr/bin/cl with lots of options and write scripts that are either portable or implementation-specific (and trivially switch from one implementation to the other).
Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by juki on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @05:06AM
(#15079781)
You can use CL for #!-scripts too. SBCL has a `--script` option for running scripts. You'll probably want to create a core with whatever libraries you need for scrips, so that the start-up time will be fast. The core will be big, but it can be shared for all scripts, so that's not much of a problem.
Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by ebzzry on Friday August 25, 2017 @06:58AM
(#15097548)
I wrote a short introduction to a more portable Common Lisp scripting system—made by Fare, himself—at https://ebzzry.io/en/script-lisp/
Re:Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket just...
by kazinator on Friday August 25, 2017 @10:21AM
(#15098628)
If you do scripting and like Lisp, you definitely should take a look at TXR.
I wrote TXR to basically be the "acceptable {awk, perl, ruby, Python, ...}" for Lisp-minded people. Well, for me, that is; but anyone else too.