cgay

Very nice article. I'll be interested to hear where you end up, with eglot or lsp-mode.

A quibble (based on my knowledge of Common Lisp, I'm not sure if it applies exactly the same way to Clojure):

"Language server has to do all of that statically, using their own parsers, tracking of variables, modules, and so on."

There's no reason an LSP server can't be run inside the Lisp image and integrate with its internal xref data. In fact, to do it any other way has serious problems due to Lisp's procedural macros making static analysis impossible.

Taking a quick look around, I see this is how the alive-lsp server works. You load it into your image and run (alive/server::start :port 8006)

It seems like this would address some of your complaints about the lack of fallback when looking for xrefs, because fallback wouldn't be necessary.

+1. Earlier than I thought. I had guessed 1989.

Gwydion Dylan has been out of the picture for years. Open Dylan is the only maintained implementation. Perhaps you went down a wrong path....

Yes. Making a macro for defining enums isn't that hard (there's one here: https://github.com/cgay/uncommon-dylan/blob/master/enum.dyla...).

I, for one, welcome my whitespace-surrounded operator overlords, but if you really don't want that you're welcome to use function-call syntax for them.

Thanks, that's the plan, although I hadn't thought about writing it up. :) It's pretty simple, really, but it has definitely highlighted the fact that there's a lot of work to do on the http server. I'm trying to decide whether to push forward with that or "just" provide Dylan integration with an existing web server framework, or maybe port Hunchentoot to Dylan with https://github.com/dylan-lang/lisp-to-dylan

We also have Dylan. Just sayin'.

I think I've fixed (well, worked around) a bug that may have been part of the problem. It's working for me now.

Thanks for the interest, everyone. It never occurred to me this would end up on Hacker News.

Possible! When I restart the server there are instantly hundreds of connections. If so many people are interested in Dylan, let's get some code contributions going, folks. :)

Looks like my tiny little website is being attacked. This will take some time to deal with. Sigh.

Should be back up. I have a bug in the http server, which is also written in Dylan and hasn't been battle hardened, where it sometimes fails to close connections.

< > is a naming convention for types (e.g., classes) only.

The Dylan language spec has amazingly few edge cases. It allows a continuum of dynamic -> static typing and a range of functional <-> OO. With the right set of libraries it could be great in the scripting space as Python, but is also designed for building large systems that run fast.