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Comment by breadchris | Hacker News Reader

I have really fallen in love with LISP recently, specifically clojure. A strong type system is really needed for it to make me feel like I can confidently develop with it.

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just get Common Lisp with this new Clojure collection and sequence API! https://github.com/dtenny/clj-coll

A modern CL that borrows ideas from Clojure, and with a strongly typed language (Coalton) also available is indeed very appealing!

Have you (or anyone else reading this) used Coalton? What's your experience been like? Seems quite appealing to me.

The language looks amazing on paper, the install process (last I tried) was a nightmare of fighting quicklisp.

That's on quicklisp, not Coalton. Honestly, quicklisp is one of the worst parts of CL nowadays (right after the lack of coroutines[1], which is by far the worst offender.) It should have been replaced a long time ago. ASDF3 provides a lot of flexibility, and quicklisp uses maybe 15% of its capabilities. There are reasons why it's still so bad, but it gets less and less excusable each year :(

[1] Does anybody know how to ping Kartik Singh about the coroutines implementation in SBCL? Apparently, he made an experimental port of the green threads implementation from CMUCL, but I can't find it anywhere online, nor any obvious way to catch anyone involved. Is the mailing list the only way?

From what I heard he's not working on it anymore but the code can be found here:

https://github.com/kartik-s/sbcl/blob/coroutines/src%2Fcode%...

Thank you!! I was very interested in `convert-thread-to-coroutine` - I saw it on the ELS presentation, and when I went spelunking in the CMUCL codebase, I found the prototypes for `fork` and `resume`, but (probably because CMUCL is single-threaded?) nothing that would suggest how that `convert...` should look like.

Why is there so little interest in green threads/coroutines in CL community? cl-cont really isn't something to point to when asked about C10K problem... or yield/yield*... or async/await...

There's great interest for it, not little. The challenge is who can do compiler programming, add a production ready implementation as contrib SBCL package, and maintain it?

Hm, my impression is based on the lack of posts or articles with people demanding this to be a feature. I searched, and it just doesn't seem to come up in discussions, and when it does, it's invariably about cl-cont and problems with it.

The first implementation doesn't need to be production-ready. And the maintenance burden (along with polishing the implementation and porting to other architectures) could be shared by a few people and done over time. Having a starting point in the form of CMUCL code (already adapted to SBCL!) is the perfect opportunity for everyone interested to chime in: enough voices in favor could convince someone capable to continue the work. Yet, there are literally just 3 comments under the ESL presentation video, and it's not mentioned anywhere else...

It's mentioned on X and Discord plenty, but you're right about cl-cont.

The first few steps would be building on top of this work and reaching out to the SBCL maintainers via the mailing list to see what it takes to get this merged in.

My experience is good, but I have only written smallish programs. Documentation is pretty polished.

Installation-wise, NixPkgs is fairly straightforward.

there is typed clojure out there if you want

https://typedclojure.org/

You could also consider getting into pre/post conditions and specs - helps a lot especially at points with user/data input

There is Typed Racket.

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