Is there anyone here using CL in production? If so, why -- compared to more mainstream solutions -- and how's your experience been?
My current application is a music hardware device that is mostly Lisp. As to why, this could be a lengthy post, and I am sure I have made one elsewhere on HN. It is a very good language, has many of the features that are being re-discovered and implemented in other languages, has an interactive model of development (REPL driven) that I find very productive and I can deploy an application across multiple platforms with little to no modifications.
I do pay for LispWorks and it is more than worth it. I make a living developing applications and devices that use Lisp and the cost is covered by a fraction of a percentage of sales.
Some people may try to use SBCL, CCL or other free implementations. I just don't have the time or risk tolerance to be dependent upon the lack of predictability for bug fixes or modifications needed to run on new architectures. The M1 architecture has been a big problem for some of these Lisps. CCL has no timeline for adoption and some commercial products are suffering as a result. GNU Scheme will probably never be able to run on the M1. LispWorks stays current and will fix reported bugs rapidly.
SBCL supports the M1; lispworks and allegro still do not.
I have been using LW on the M1 for months. Why do you think Apple Silicon is not supported?
>>> file lispworks-8-0-0-macos64-universal lispworks-8-0-0-macos64-universal: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures:
[x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64]
[arm64:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64]
lispworks-8-0-0-macos64-universal (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
lispworks-8-0-0-macos64-universal (for architecture arm64): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64
> Native support for Apple silicon Macs
SBCL is native on the M1, too.
I tend to find LW users are very comfortable with their IDE, however coming from an Emacs World, I struggled a bit.
However once I get all my best parts of Emacs into LW, I will be very happy as it is written completely in CL and together with CAPI and the readily available source code for its Editor, it can do a lot more than Emacs for Lisp Development
You're shipping commercial software with CL so I think you're about as hardcore as it gets :)
> I have modified the LW editor to be more "Mac-like" which I guess makes me less hardcore.
If you mean in terms of keybindings, I did the same when I did a trial recently even though I usually use Emacs for working with lisps. I think it's nice to keybindings that match most text editing programs, and I think the benefits of Emacs-y structural editing are a little overstated (in my opinion). Was just curious to hear how folks using LW do their work.
That said, I find Emacs to be a powerhouse, stable text editor. LW has a decent editor, but it is really hard to get to the same level of Emacs in many of the smaller aspects that you end up taking for granted and don’t want to do without
I've been interested for a long time, but never really came across examples of established developers branching our so I don't really know where to look to get started. I'm already an emacs user too, so it bothered me that way too.
You will often encounter people making bullet points of why Lisp is or is not better than <insert language> here. This was me! I was a self taught programmer who grew up in the 80s using assembly language and Basic and then C and C++. The type of hardware that could run Lisp was not available to me and my career trajectory took me towards C++/Pascal/Objective-C. My first serious encounter with Lisp was using a Symbolics workstation that was sitting in a conference room at Apple. It blew my mind! I wanted to have an environment similar to that combined with what I was working on with OS X. It never happened.
Current hardware is amazingly powerful and many of the gripes people raised about Lisp are no longer pressing issues. I don't experience memory pressure or GC lags or any of the issues that used to be show stoppers thirty years ago.
You may find that Lisp is for you and it is scratching some particular itch you may not realize you even had!
The biggest thing that I'm looking towards lisp for is interactive programming. Python is currently my primary language, and I heavily test/prototype things in the REPL as I'm programming or dropping into one for debugging.
Additionally, I like the things you get with a complied language but have zero interest in going deep (I know them and have used them, but not professionally) with the standard C derivatives of C, C++, obj-C, and Java. I'm also pretty tired of many of the gotchas in python with its bolted-on-type system and is essentially a wrapper around C. I love the libraries and functionality, but the amount of boilerplate and testing needed to produce reliable code has burnt me out on it.
I'd probably go with Swift and SwiftUI if it weren't Apple only and still limited in what it can be practically used for, such as building deployable web services with it.
The other thing that has always lingered in my mind is the promise of DSLs/functional programming/etc. or other abstractions that never lived up to their potential ergonomically in other languages. I'd start using them but almost immediately run into edge cases that required workarounds to get working. After a while, I would abandon them entirely because the workaround added up to not being cleaner overall or leading to lower readability and maintainability.
Like function composition, I'd love to have functions that are generic work loops/data pipelines that I pass in different data and business logic/conditionals to. Still, in python, it's challenging to do that cleanly/maintainable. Or even some of the basic stuff Ruby does with metaprogramming that ends up being a nightmare to attempt in python. Even javascript does better with functional programming than python or any C derivatives.
So I have a fair sense of why I'm leaning towards lisp. I'm more interested in jumping in and using it for practical things. For example, I want to write a web API that uses SQLite. How do I prototype and test that using lisp? Kind of a “working programmer’s guide to getting going with common lisp.”
Oh, I'm also currently an independent software developer, so I don't need to worry about external constraints.
I will read On Lisp first, though! I just read the preface, and it directly addresses several of my desired outcomes.
I was curious and stalked your profile, but I didn't come up with anything that summarized your reasoning on why you use Lisp beyond this brief statement. Perhaps you were remembering the discussion around "Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28366292).
If you get a chance I'd love to read your take on in it. There are so few people doing active development in lisp its hard to let go of a chance like this.
Does their licensing cost relate to your sales?
I remember inquiring some time back, and to buy the commercial version, you had to, among other things, agree to their right to audit your books, which to me seemed draconian.
It's great way to achieve high development velocity without compromises on runtime efficiency. I'm substantially proficient in C (we've had a bunch of systems done in it too) and there is no question we'd have missed our budget/time/features target had we chose it instead.
That said we don't use SBCL but LispWorks for delivery and CCL for development.
CCL happened to have threading support on Arm32 target we use so that's how the development historically started. LW license was procured later: we gave it a run and turned out the tree-shaked binaries it produces use much less memory. We're comfortable running it on a 128Mb RAM (single core) SoM as a part of embedded Linux build.
† That said we do have a simulator for the product running on a 64c/128t server. It however mostly tests deployment/procurement/networking part of the thing rather than physical component it operates on.
Point is if I have to attach to remote hosts anyway I might just as well continue to use Emacs Slime rather than learn the ropes of LW's own remote debugger. Also LW license allows for unlimited redistribution of deliverables (that you can't however attach to) but the compiler itself is licensed per seat.
(to everyone answering: is your company listed there?? Thanks in advance)
See also this recent interview: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/
(and I also do for a DB-management script and a simple webapp)