Show HN: A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF
43 comments
·April 27, 2025danilor
Hey I'm curious as why you chose nongnu to host your project instead of github/gitlab! I don't know much about it, hence my curiosity ;)
andreamonaco
I don't like sites with heavy Javascript, especially if it's non-free. (Though recently I started using Github for a different project.)
Savannah is very basic, perhaps too much, but it's okay for my project.
kazinator
I hosted the TXR git on nongnu first, starting at around late 2009 or early 2010 maybe?
I abandoned that when I discovered there's no control. I seem to recall having to wait like over a week for someone to enable non-fast-forward pushes. Overly strict and understaffed. I opted for self hosting.
I kept the project web page there, though.
volemo
Tbh, this is the first time I see nongnu.org used for something other than Emacs packages (I know that’s on me), so much so that I even thought this was a solution to substitute Emacs Lisp with Common Lisp. :O
whartung
At what point does a CL implementation need to be before it can start hoovering up the available library code from other implementations (license permitting).
How many LOOP macros does the community need, particularly when bootstrapping an implementation, as an example.
Similarly with, arguably 70-80% of the runtime. The CL spec is dominated by the large library which, ideally, should be mostly portable CL, at least I would think.
klibertp
You're not the first one to think so: https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL
I'm unsure how complete it is, but it seems to cover much of the standard.
v9v
Here's a recently-written summary of the different libraries in SICL (including each library's purpose and status) http://metamodular.com/SICL-related-libraries/sicl-related-l...
WalterGR
> a debugger with stepping, a feature that most free CL implementations lack.
I think most free CL implementations have a stepper. Which ones do not?
andreamonaco
I tried stepping in various free implementations, but I couldn't really follow the source forms and execute them one by one. Also, I couldn't find much information online. Maybe your experience is different?
WalterGR
I haven’t used CL recently so I can’t speak from experience. But it looks like:
CMU CL, SBCL, and LispWorks have steppers.
Clozure does not. (Edit: an answer on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37754935/what-are-effici... suggests it does...)
As I understand it, those are the big 4.
Clisp, ABCL, and Allegro also appear to have steppers.
Always cool to see a new implementation, though!
klibertp
In most of those implementations (certainly in SBCL) it's either you break or step; you can't start stepping from a breakpoint. SBCL got some support for that this year, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43791709. It, however, doesn't allow stepping into any functions called after the break.
Also, the compilers are allowed to make the code unsteppable in some cases, depending on optimization declaration: generally, debug needs to be >=2 and > speed/compilation-speed/space. In some circumstances, you land in decompiled/macroexpanded code, which is also quite unhelpful.
Anyway, it's not that source-level stepping isn't there at all, it's just quirky and somewhat inconvenient. A fresh implementation that does comparatively little optimization and is byte-code based can probably support debuggers better. I hope such support won't go away later when the native code compiler is implemented.
badmonster
Does alisp plan to eventually support full compilation to native code, or will it mainly stay an interpreter with limited compilation?
andreamonaco
Yeah, the goal is first bytecode compilation and then full
eadmund
Congratulations! Always good to see another Lisp in the world.
Have you thought about writing up your experience?
andreamonaco
Also, my Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/andreamonaco) has behind-the-scenes posts, some even in the free tier
andreamonaco
Thanks! Maybe I could do that, if I see that people are interested
neonscribe
Do you have a goal in mind for this project?
andreamonaco
Ideally I'd reach ANSI compliance, first with a bytecode compiler and then with a full one
neonscribe
Is there some important shortcoming of all the existing Common Lisp implementations that you would like to correct?
ngcc_hk
Awaiting answers. Seems stepping is one.
Btw, I stick to sbcl as I used vim and so far the script here works for me. Might try this when back to do lisp.
CleverLikeAnOx
What is ASDF?
mikedelago
ASDF - another system definition facility - is the de facto standard build system for common lisp.
In common lisp, you don't need a build system at all; you can `(load "file.lisp")` everything and it should generally just work. But of course, build systems are useful tools, so nonetheless ASDF exists and it's nice enough to the degree that nobody has built a better and more widespread common lisp build system.
Some good trivial examples are in the lisp cookbook:
alexjplant
No idea why you're being downvoted for asking a simple question about an acronym. From Wikipedia [1]:
> ASDF (Another System Definition Facility) is a package format and a build tool for Common Lisp libraries. It is analogous to tools such as Make and Ant.
Contemporary developers using more mainstream languages are likely more familiar with asdf [2], the "Multiple Runtime Version Manager".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_System_Definition_Faci...
kazinator
> To build from a git snapshot, start with
> $ autoreconf -i
> (which is not needed in released tarballs) and then run the usual
Why would you do that to yourself and your users in a new project this day and age.
A release tarball should be nothing more than a git snapshot of a commit.
Drop the GNU AutoCrap if you know what's good for you.
andreamonaco
I'm not sure I understand. What I do in my project is very common practice: generated files (like the configure script) are not part of the repository, but they are put in released tarballs
kazinator
It's a bad practice commonly found in GNU projects, which results in an overcomplicated, inconvenient and unstable build system that will discourage future collaboration. Many of these projects are very old, two decades or more; they are living with ancient decisions made in a world of dozens of incompatible Unix forks.
One thing to do instead is to just write a ./configure script which detects what you need. In other words, be compatible at the invocation level. Make sure this is checked into the repo Anyone checking out any commit runs that, and that's it.
Someone who makes a tarball using git, out of a tagged release commit, should have a "release tarball".
A recent HN submission shows a ./configure system made from scratch using makefiles, which parallelizes the tests. That could be a good starting point for a C on Linux project today.
sspiff
This is true and standard for (really) old projects, and dealing with this scripts and their problems used to be the bane of my existence 10 years ago. But I can't say I've encountered any such projects in the last 5 or so years.
Either they use a modern programming language (which typically has an included build system, like rust's cargo or simply go build) of they use simple Makefiles. For C/C++ codebases, it seems like CMake has become the dominant build system.
All of these are typically better than what GNU autoconf offers, with modern modern features and equally or better flexibility to deal with differences between operating systems, distributions, and/or optional or alternative libraries.
I don't really see why anyone would pick autoconf for a modern project.
JonChesterfield
Cmake is by a wide margin the worst build tool I've used. That covers at least autoconf, gmake, nmake, scons, waf, tup, visual studio, the boost thing, bash scripts and lua scripts. Even the hand edited xml insanity of visual studio caused negligible grief compared to cmake.
shawn_w
Having used both autoconf and cmake, I have a strong preference for autoconf (plus hand written makefiles; never been able to get into automake). It's just easier to use for me, especially when it comes to writing tests for supported functions and adding optional features you want to enable or disable via configure script options.
varjag
CMake is really more of a C++ crowd thing, it never won the mindshare with C.
> I don't really see why anyone would pick autoconf for a modern project.
If you build for your system only and never ever plan to cross compile by all means go with static makefile.
valorzard
I would be excited to use but since it’s using GPLv3 I can’t actually use it for a lot of projects I’d want to make ;-; Is it possible to relicense to LGPL or MPL instead?
kstrauser
In general, people who license something as GPLv3 probably consider that a feature, not a bug.
I mentioned here recently that I released a personal project under the GPLv3. The very first issue someone filed in GitHub was to ask me to relicense it as something more business friendly. I don't think I've been so offended by an issue before. If I'm writing something for fun, I could not possibly be less interested in helping else someone monetize my work. They can play by Free Software rules, or they can write their own version for themselves and license it however they want. I don't owe them the freedom to make it un-Free.
The fact that this is hosted on a FSF-managed service indicates the author likely sees it similarly.
fc417fc802
I generally agree but it's worth noting that languages are a bit different. Obviously there are GPL'd compilers but those often make an explicit carveout for things like the runtime and standard library. Meanwhile in the Lisp world my impression is that most (but certainly not all) implementations are permissively licensed in part due to concerns that shipping an image file is essentially shipping the entire language implementation verbatim.
kstrauser
That totally makes sense and I do appreciate why that would be a problem for some users.
And yet, this is a single-user labor of love by one person hosting it on FSF’s servers. I don't know them, and this is pure conjecture, but I suspect they probably couldn't care less if that made it challenging for commercial users. There are plenty of other Lisps for them to choose from.
-__---____-ZXyw
Hard to believe this comment could be serious, but nonetheless, for the impartial observers, there is a healthy ecosystem of Common Lisp implementations, from "permissive" open source all the way to (expensive) commercial, proprietary ones.
https://common-lisp.net/implementations
I think a full-featured GPLv3 implementation would be very cool, personally.
Implementation of the standard is still not complete, but breakpoints and stepping work quite well! It also has some support for watchpoints, that no implementation has.
Now it ships with ASDF and is capable of loading systems!
Let me know if you like it. Support on Patreon or Liberapay is much appreciated