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Comment by draven | Hacker News Reader

Looks like SBCL plus libraries. The author, vindarel, is here on HN.

Hi o/ Hopefully the goal of CIEL is well explained. I use it daily (with the core image, in my editor), I ship products with it. It saves me a load of time, when I start a new project, when I need to interact with the outside world, when I want to write a little something and ship it on the server without Python's mess, etc. Speaking of which, Django is of course difficult to replace, but I started an automatic DB dashboard for CRUD operations, something's on the way (unreleased).

I integrated CL step by step for my clients' work, and CIEL is another means to this end. To use CL, for real. None of my projects need CL's superpowers, but I want them for development, deployment and monitoring!

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Today I fixed a few issues and released a v0.2: https://github.com/ciel-lang/CIEL/releases/tag/v02 The key point is that CIEL should be much easier to install, specially on Mac. We now rely on many less system dependencies.

If you find out that CIEL is still difficult to install on your platform, don't hesitate to send details on an issue. Thanks in advance.

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TLDR; May CIEL ease and soften your CL journey.

ps: you have no idea how much time it took me to discover certain things! Now you have them here, ready, packaged :-]

I absolutely love this and will be using it extensively for scripts.

I was wondering - do you also use it for larger (multi-file) projects? Any recommendations on how to structure those when using CIEL?

Awesome, thanks for the feedback.

Yes I do, of course, and I actually use it nearly exclusively for multi-file projects: I don't write short scripts everyday, but I have bigger projects that need more features. The one I am on: extract data from an existing DB, format it, save it to a csv, send it with SFTP. I build a binary and send it to my servers.

For this I use :ciel as a dependency, I use a typical project structure: a system definition in an .asd file (that :depends-on (:ciel)), and sources. I also start my editor with CIEL's core image. I build a binary the usual way out of this, I don't run this app as a script, specially if I added a couple dependencies. But that's OK, I benefited from CIEL during development.

I recommend to start with a file packages.lisp that defines 1 (one) package for the whole application, to use it across multiple files, until it makes sense to create a second package. Otherwise, one can easily loose oneself into export & import symbols hell, specially when we are new at it. So I don't recommend the "one-package-per-file" approach.

Hopefully the Cookbook gets you covered if you need examples.

Happy real-world lisping!

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