Re:A new version of Common-Lisp.net has been launched
by kamaal on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:07AM
(#18193166)
>>For example on the Deep Space One spaceship the application was deployed with LispWorks
>>Imagine your application is a CAD system written in Common Lisp with CLOS (there are and were a bunch of those).
For some one considering seriously writing Lisp as a full time job, are these kind of opportunities still there?
I mean how big is Common Lisp usage these days?
Re:A new version of Common-Lisp.net has been launched
by pjmlp on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:20AM
(#18193261)
Depends on where one is living.
Syscog is a Portuguese company focused on Lisp based solutions.
http://www.siscog.eu/index.asp
https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/scheduling/siscog.lh...
Re:A new version of Common-Lisp.net has been launched
by lispm on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:12AM
(#18193200)
I have no idea, but it's 'small' - though there are still two commercial vendors. I'd guess that Franz still sells into some corporate environments and into government/military/security/... Domains people usually don't hear about and end users might not even know that they are using Lisp. If a Lisp-based graph database powers some customer-relationship application at a telco, then nobody will know that it is Lisp. There is also the myth that some military commander won't let their Lisp Machine application go, because it's the only one that never crashed in their data center. Former Swissair had an expert system to improve seat allocation (IIRC), which they maintained for more than a decade - it's might even still be running in Lisp - nobody would know that it exists and how it works... There are also Lisp applications which monitor and control processes in chemical plants - for the end user it's not visible what this is written in.
Re:A new version of Common-Lisp.net has been launched
by serialdev on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:25AM
(#18193305)
A bit out of topic but I remember you mentioned you were working on a lisp book and asked what we would wanna see on it.
Well for me, I'm super curious about compiler development, and I think, in the topic of this thread, maybe a chapter on writing a recursive descent parser for JS? building a transpiler? or using lisp as a intermediary with LLVM IR? somewhere where either DSL || "Code is data" and the true advantages of lisp shine through, and I would love that from an experienced lisper. Also if you could go into some use cases for tunable compilers that are seldom elaborated when that is mentioned as a huge lisp advantage! Thanks for giving the community your time in advance!
The 'fast' Lisps are often the native Lisps (SBCL, Clozure CL, Allegro CL, LispWorks, Lucid CL, ...). For selected applications some implementations were more specialized (for example GCL with fast numerics for Maxima)...
SBCL has the advantage of some more advanced type handling.
But fast isn't just low-level benchmarks. It might mean fast for a certain application. For example on the Deep Space One spaceship the application was deployed with LispWorks (and not OpenMCL/Clozure CL) because LispWorks had the best GC (soft realtime) and could be running on a hardened PowerPC processor on a real-time OS.
And 'fast' in Lisp is also important for mostly unoptimized, but compiled, code with full runtime checks and lots of flexibility. Stuff which would be 'full debug' mode in C++. For example the typical Lisp Machine OS could run in a full development mode without much runtime speed penalty - just lots of space penalty. It still had to deal with the window system (written in Lisp), disk access (written in Lisp), interrupt handler and scheduler (written in Lisp) ... Is that 'fast' enough for the interactive user? Benchmark-wise the system might be slow, but it might perform well for applications running multiple threads and lots of interrupts.
Imagine your application is a CAD system written in Common Lisp with CLOS (there are and were a bunch of those). It might need a large address space and zillions of CLOS objects. Will it run fast enough for interactive 3d workloads? How fast is the GC? How fast is the CLOS implementation? How does it deal with FFI operations into OpenGL... Stuff like that had been developed with Lucid CL and Allegro CL. At a time when CMUCL still was printing GC messages to the terminal...
Nowadays a lot of machines are "fast enough" and have lots of memory. But when one needed a 64bit SGI for a demanding application, Allegro CL was the thing to use. I think the IDE for Crash Bandicoot was Allegro CL on an SGI. Later similar graphics applications in Lisp ould also run on large Windows NT machines with faster graphics cards. Today Allegro CL is also the only CL one I know, which has a partly parallel GC - a demanding application like their database and knowledge-bases drives the need for faster runtimes. Lucid CL no longer exists (though LispWorks provided support for it), but it had a compilation mode for full-program compilation, which enabled good runtime performance. Many commercial applications had been deployed with it - until the company went away - after investing lots of money into an advanced C++ IDE which did not fly on the market. With something like LispWorks and Allegro CL one can develop normal-looking and fast applications for the desktop - stuff which feels much less sluggish than your typical Java desktop application and has useful interactive performance.