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Comment by abc_lisper | Hacker News Reader

What's the state of development of this? Did somebody use it with Raspberry pi? I want to use this over Clojure(only on pi) because I have read Clojure is slow on Raspberry pi(even 3, not sure how true that is).

Also, how fast is this? How does it compare to other lisps(or schemes) in terms of speed? Can someone port the benchmarks to https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org.

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I posted the link, but am not one of the developers. This got a little attention a couple of years ago, and I thought to look it up today. It has a nice website now at least. I really like the idea behind it (small install, lightweight, fast), but don't know how effective it will be without a larger community. I can honestly do without a lot of libraries as long as there are decent built-ins.

I really wish Pixie just had a REPL and compiled to native code via LLVM so I could give coworkers a .exe.

Edit:

Just looked at the github page. It doesn't look very active to me although I wouldn't say dead. The only small lisps I know of in development are Picolisp and Newlisp.

PicoLisp is very small and extremely powerful at the same time. It has a built in Prolog...

Do you use it though? I really like the concepts, but the speed could be better (I know Alexander talked about this), and docs could be more beginner friendly. It's a small expert community.

I have used it in commercial embedded hardware shipping tens of thousands of units, in the USD 1000 range. Speed is excellent for the most part - where it's not it's trivial to call out to C libraries. Agree about docs but what would really help at this point would be more QA on Stackoverflow. And a good Windows port.

Agreed on the Windows thing. I tend to stay away from Cygwin. I like the new Picolisp site btw. The code on Rosetta code is terse, and uses slightly different idioms than I'm used to.

Come to think of it, some docker and other fancy container magic could also help adoption. And other such things people use nowadays. Maybe a nodejs integration? Stuff like that.

My dream would be to just use something like Picolisp on Windows without the workarounds. Maybe that can be done via the new Bash on Windows10? Idk.

Must be possible with the new Ubuntu layer whatever its called. Edit: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-o...

They say WSL apps can not interact directly with Windows apps. So yes and no to your question. I would say it would be similar to running in a virtual machine but more integrated.

Cygwin is great for processing data and generally have a lot of tools one might be used to from Linux. But when targeting Windows, that is, creating a program FOR Windows, maybe for general distribution, cygwin feels very cumbersome to me. PicoLisp is MIT licensed and small, so could be an integral part of a Windows program. PicoLisp has promise on Windows, but someone would have to step up and maintain a Windows package for it. I have been daydreaming about it but I have too many half-finished projects under my belt to fool myself into starting that too.

I have used Chicken Scheme on Raspberry Pi to good effect. Clojure is likely slow because the JVM runtime requires much more disk access than compiled-to-C systems.

Have you tried any Clojure->Scheme compilers? After that stage you can use any Scheme->C/Whatever compiler.

There are Clojure->Scheme compilers?

Close:

https://github.com/takikawa/racket-clojure

https://docs.racket-lang.org/rackjure/index.html

Yes, at least one, and I don't know how well it works. But here it is:

https://github.com/takeoutweight/clojure-scheme

I don't see the point of Clojure without the JVM or without being the client side of a Clojure web application. Scheme is just fine by me.

Have you tried Clojurescript on nodejs for Raspberry pi? We have used nodejs on Raspberry Pi with success. I've wanted to try Clojurescript on it, but our shop doesn't use it. I imagine it would work great with it's good JS interop features.

I run some very simple Clojure [1] on an RPi 2 as part of a home monitoring system.

Startup is considerably longer than on other platforms (30 sec or so), but I haven't had any issues with runtime performance, and having a Lisp running on what is essentially an embedded platform is very useful.

(It'd be easy to make the argument that my agent code doesn't do much, but it doesn't diminish the fact that Clojure is able to usefully work on an RPi. :-))

https://github.com/mschaef/metlog/tree/master/metlog-agent

That is good to hear. Ordered my pi!

Not that I know if it helps, since you seem predisposed to Clojure, but CHICKEN Scheme on a Pi also works quite well. We even have direct bindings to GPIO and the like, since someone has gone ahead and packaged a library that speaks to the GPIO through the wiringPi project (http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/raspberry-pi-gpio).

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