Personaly i found abcl a bad experience.
Thoughts on ecl & clisp ?

sbcl works nice & fine. But i’t’s the only lisp implementation i know.
There are good books on racket-scheme & chez-cheme.
The only book i know for lisp is, “Common lisp , a gentle introduction to symbolic computing”.

  • aartaka@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    CCL is mostly only on life support. The native port to the Apple Silicon Macs isn’t under way. CCL isn’t making any progress.

    Didn’t know it’s that bad 😢 A shame—CCL is a nice piece of work.

    This is the index of the Allegro CL documentation: https://franz.com/support/documentation/10.1/doc/contents.htm

    I’ve been overly generic, I guess. What I meant was answering a (supposed) OP’s request for raw implementation usability. Which is REPL, introspection facilities, SLIME/SLY integration. Allegro is not perfect when viewed from this perspective. Proprietary implementation makes it hard to inspect what’s going on in the image and optimize the code comprehensively:

    • disassemble is useless.

    • Inspection is locked to what they provide—even SLIME/SLY merely uses the implementation-provided function for inspected parts. On other implementations, SLIME/SLY provides a lot of auxiliary info that implementation doesn’t explicitly provides.

    • In general, you can’t override the useful parts of the REPL easily: defining new REPL commands is a pain, building GUI tools inspecting the image is either parsing the unreliable raw output of Allegro-provided functions or giving up and using what they provide.

    Given that OP likely asked about the general development experience, and that I’ve done a lot of work with basic text REPL interaction on all the implementations I listed above—Allegro is not the ideal basis, especially for learning.

    The documentation and the additional products they provide is good, but that’s beyond the basics that OP is probably interested in.

    I don’t know many open source Common Lisp implementations on this level.

    Fair, I’ve been overly generic too. To me, the basic inspection and interaction is smoother at least on SBCL and CCL, which is, like, two out of five? somewhat maintained implementations.

    • lispm@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Proprietary implementation makes it hard to inspect what’s going on in the image and optimize the code comprehensively

      If I were a paying Franz customer and I would be interested in SLIME/SLY improvements, I would kindly ask them to provide it. Maybe they would then just do it or ask the customer to pay for it. That’s what technical support is for.

      Second: as a Franz customer one could get the source code for much of the product. I’m not a customer, but I guess this possibility still exists.

      Allegro is not the ideal basis, especially for learning

      I think it can actually be the opposite. Among new Lisp users GNU Emacs is often cited as a hurdle.

      Allegro CL comes with an GUI based IDE on Linux, Windows, and Web browsers. This makes it possible to use it without GNU Emacs + SLIME/SLY. I consider that to be a feature. The IDE of Allegro CL has a bunch of features: https://franz.com/support/documentation/10.1/doc/cgide.htm#menus-dialogs-1

      Best: the stuff is written all in Allegro CL itself and can be reused.

      • aartaka@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Oh wait, it really ships with a GUI-based IDE… I’m convinced—Allegro is good, especially when paid. When talking about free version, my non-introspection comments still apply, but they are kind of implied for a free version of proprietary product.