Hacker News Reader

Comment by juki | Hacker News Reader

Common Lisp is a very stable language. The standard hasn't changed in twenty years, so (unlike many other languages) old code is still perfectly good. Libraries that haven't been updated in a decade still work just as well as they did a decade ago.

View on HN

It's not just that standard hasn't changed in almost twenty-five years, most of it was agreed upon in the early 1980's and it was developed by consensus among a language community of working programmers and commercial interests.

This is nice to know. Do Quicklisp packages typically come with test suites? At least then I can check if a package will work before I commit to using it.

Yes, almost certainly, except very fresh new libraries.

Typically yes. You should be able to run the test suite through ASDF. For example

    CL-USER> (ql:quickload :trivia)
    ... loads ...
    CL-USER> (asdf:test-system :trivia)
    ... test output ...

But unfortunately not all libraries set up their test-ops properly. You can usually find a readme at ~/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/... which might have instructions for running tests.

You can also check out cl-test-grid[1] and its results[2]. It shows every quicklisp library tested against every (?) CL distribution.

[1] https://github.com/cl-test-grid/cl-test-grid [2] https://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/library/

Not only do many of the do, it is common practice for release candidates of asdf, sbcl (and probably other implementations) to run those tests against release candidates as a regression test.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com