Re:State of the Common Lisp ecosystem, 2020
by reikonomusha on Monday February 08, 2021 @01:24PM
(#26068134)
dougk is one of the few people currently and immediately capable of such "long strides" I spoke of. He is continually improving SBCL in remarkable ways, especially under-the-hood work that just makes all Lisp applications better without additional work on the programmers' parts.
I attended the Vienna conference where he discussed such matters, and he has great ideas, but many of his play-nice-with-UNIX tools are still very bleeding edge and require you to be SBCL-developer-level in-the-know to use them.
I hope later this year that I'll be able to open up a full-time role for SBCL development as a part of my own job, in a similar way that Google employs dougk to work on SBCL. The only trouble will be finding a qualified applicant who can do the full-time work...
Re:State of the Common Lisp ecosystem, 2020
by karlosz on Monday February 08, 2021 @05:59PM
(#26071475)
Just a correction; I'm the Charles Zhang you mentioned and I'm an undergrad graduating this semester (looking for full time work after!), not a grad student. Also I don't recognize your username but I probably know you if you were in Vienna...
Re:State of the Common Lisp ecosystem, 2020
by reikonomusha on Monday February 08, 2021 @06:10PM
(#26071618)
Whoops, my apologies for the mistake!
Not only:
> Doug Katzman talked about his work at Google getting SBCL to work with Unix better. For those of you who don’t know, he’s done a lot of work on SBCL over the past couple of years, not only adding a lot of new features to the GC and making it play better with applications which have alien parts to them, but also has done a tremendous amount of cleanup on the internals and has helped SBCL become even more Sanely Bootstrappable. That’s a topic for another time, and I hope Doug or Christophe will have the time to write up about the recent improvements to the process, since it really is quite interesting.
> Anyway, what Doug talked about was his work on making SBCL more amenable to external debugging tools, such as gdb and external profilers. It seems like they interface with aliens a lot from Lisp at Google, so it’s nice to have backtraces from alien tools understand Lisp. It turns out a lot of prerequisite work was needed to make SBCL play nice like this, including implementing a non-moving GC runtime, so that Lisp objects and especially Lisp code (which are normally dynamic space objects and move around just like everything else) can’t evade the aliens and will always have known locations.
https://mstmetent.blogspot.com/2020/01/sbcl20-in-vienna-last...
also, ASDF's main author spent his career at Google.
> the best-in-class experience is still Emacs and SLIME
Really I want to mention again that Atom's SLIMA is getting very good. The Sublime plugin and a VSCode one are coming close.