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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

Please don't take HN threads into programming language flamewar. That's one of the things we most don't want here, and it's easy to avoid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I know it doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types

Only "experimental" status on Windows is definitely unfortunate for Windows SBCL users.

However, today in 2022, the server world has been eaten up by Linux. Few if any production server deployments would run on Windows -- there definitely might be some major ones but an overwhelming number would deploy to Linux. Then there would be a lot of developers that run Linux in a Virtual Machine, dual boot, use WSL/WSL2 or have a dedicated Linux machine.

There is also a influential but niche developer crowd that runs MacOS.

What I'm trying to say is that not having full support for Windows hardly implies "[SBCL] doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types."

A statement like this may have been true in 2000. Not in 2022.

Windows is no longer the most important platform for people who either develop software or deploy software to servers.

I am not trying to criticize Windows in any way. It's just the reality that a big chunk of development action is taking place on Linux (and in a niche way on MacOS) today.

I don't know how true this is. Windows Server is massive in the enterprise corporate world. My first job as a system tech was spent exclusively on Windows machines across numerous large companies, and I've worked at several companies since that are Microsoft shops deploying to Windows Servers.

I never implied that Windows Server is not significant. It would definitely have a lot significant deployments. The absolute number of deployments would also be quite large. But I can bet that this will pale in comparison with Linux. Think about it -- all major cloud providers use Linux as a building block to provide their services. Their clients probably use Linux for deployment too.

My objection was to the statement that "[SBCL] doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types". And to that I implied that Windows is no longer as dominant in 2022 as it may have been, say, in 2000.

SBCL is an open source, non-commercial, project. That means it largely depends on volunteer effort to get anything done and if the volunteers are insufficiently interested in or focused on Windows, you get the current result.

If you do want Windows support for Common Lisp, happily it exists! But primarily from the commercial CL versions, LispWorks and Allegro CL.

We used SBCL on a commercial medical AI project about 12 years ago, and we paid a monthly support stipend to a SBCL maintainer - really worth the money! I forget the guy’s name but he was there for us the few times we needed him.

Thank you. I'm sorry I was harsh, but I just spent a frustratingly long time getting Sketch to work on Windows, but I did it. MSYS2 to compile a missing lib was the missing piece that did it. I'm frustrated, but not giving up.

https://github.com/vydd/sketch

Windows is pretty much tier 1 for Allegro and Lisp Works, you get what you pay for.

It's experimental because few of the developers (and few SBCL users) are on Windows, so it's possible more bugs slip through. Developing on Windows is terrible, so it's no surprise volunteers don't want to spend their time doing it.

FWIW, I've used SBCL on Windows, and never had any problems. I wasn't using CFFI, POSIX, threads, or things like that, so that probably helped.

"Developing on Windows is terrible" I presume you meant "developing SBCL" on Windows is terrible? Windows is a pretty good development platform nowadays with modern tooling - but it's certainly different than posix environments.

To clarify my position, my work include maintaining and developing a cross platform native codebase that serves Linux, Windows and macOS, in a global setting.

I find each platforms native toolchain good in their own way. Each has it's particular quirks. The thing is that when you learn the quirks on one platform, the other platform has other quirks - hence it likely feels "worse" for a while, when in fact, it's just "different".

I don't know about SBCL in particular, I just meant Windows development in general is pretty bad compared to the other platforms.

I'm using Visual Studio 2019 and ReSharper at work right now, and it's a slow, bloated mess compared to dev environments I've used on Linux and OSX.

Sorry to rant, but I recently started a new job using Windows for the first time in about 10 years, and the slow dev environment is my only pet peeve.

It sounds something is not right. ReSharper occasionally puts everything to a halt.

If you office policy allows, try disengaging it. A few versions ago Visual Studio had lots of missing features that ReSharper provided instead, but in 2019 and 2022 the gap is considerably smaller.

I am using visual studio daily and 2022 is particularly snappy.

Also - In work setting some end point policies enforce anti-virus software that converts the system to an unbearably slow state.

If you prefer posix tools for command line use (IMO they are much more ergonomic than powershell) wsl2 works pretty well for grepping and such.

Add WSL2 and it's pretty much there (if not better because of both worlds) and that's coming form someone who works exclusively nowadays on Mac, ChromeOS, and Linux.

I was under the impression that most/all of the commercial lisps were quite windows centric? Now there does tend to be a connection between Foss software and Foss operating systems.

Both Allegro CL and LispWorks originally are coming from the UNIX world and they still support various UNIX variants: Linux, Freebsd, macOS and Solaris. Both support Windows. LispWorks also has runtimes for Android and iOS/iPadOS.

LispWorks has a very good native Macintosh development environment as well as the CAPI interface library, which enables one to develop apps that use native widgets on multiple platforms. I do much of my development on my Mac for an application that is deployed on Linux.

The IDE and CAPI runs on all their desktop platforms: via Windows, macOS and GTK+.

I work on several systems where windows is poorly supported. In general it's because everything else is POSIX(ish).

Even though I use windows as my OS, I do most of my coding in WSL, so I still don't need a true windows version of things I work on.

True windows support in my experience usually requires paying someone (unless you are doing something graphical, where Windows often is the best choice).

It’s common that many languages find windows support hard as it’s so different to all the unix-like operating systems.

Node.js used to have patchy support for Windows. It took time and investment from Microsoft themselves to fix that.

Where does it say that?

I deliver a product using SBCL on Windows, it works fine but I'm not using any features that might cause problems like threads or external libraries.

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