Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

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I tend to use Clozure CL most of the time. Clozure CL's compiler is a bit more primitive, but the compiled code is smaller, the compiler is faster, the runtime is much better (better GC) and it has a basic non-GNU-Emacs IDE on the Mac.

> f there had been very good free versions of Common Lisp 20+ years ago, then I think the language would be more popular today.

This fails to understand a few things. Good versions of Common Lisp did exist 20+ years ago, even free ones. But Common Lisp implementations tend to be complex systems and thus its not easy to to get this financed over a long time.

Common Lisp was unpopular between 90s and 2000. A new generation of developers had to rediscover it to revive some of it: SBCL, ECL, ...

> Today Pharo Smalltalk really is a wonderful programming environment and it is free. In the 1980s and 1990s it was very expensive to get a Smalltalk programming environment.

Common Lisp has many free and good implementations today.

If you look at Pharo Smalltalk, it's nice, but it has the same limitations like Squeak and other implementations: it looks and feels non-native. That's because the UI is non-native.

To be fair, the compiler is more than a bit more primitive. Clozure doesn't come close to SBCL where numeric code is concerned. But the garbage collector really is much better, especially under heavy concurrency.

> Clozure doesn't come close to SBCL where numeric code is concerned.

Well, you have to declare everything then you get similar performance.

I haven't found that to be the case. I don't mean that Clozure's performance is bad, but optimizing numeric code is SBCL's reason for being. When I switched from SBCL to Clozure, I had to move things like password hashing out of Lisp, because I couldn't get acceptable performance out of Ironclad.

In my experience you can get excellent numeric performance out of CCL (and earlier MCL). But there are several issues and it may be a lot of work.

But I definitely agree that the SBCL compiler is a lot better doing these things and it is much easier there.

> Common Lisp was unpopular between 90s and 2000. A new generation of developers had to rediscover it to revive some of it: SBCL, ECL, ...

And they miss so much, because they only get part of what a Common Lisp dev env used to be.

Since the good alternatives are the commercial ones, that most nowadays aren't willing to pay for.

> If you look at Pharo Smalltalk, it's nice, but it has the same limitations like Squeak and other implementations: it looks and feels non-native. That's because the UI is non-native.

Yeah, there is this goal of trying to replicate Smalltalk, the OS, experience, instead of just being another programming language.

I think Pharo is moving into the direction of better native integration, though.

> I think Pharo is moving into the direction of better native integration, though.

Currently its IDE is looking completely non-native on my Mac. No application on my Mac uses hierarchical windows. Pharo does. Its sub-windows are looking alien. It does not use the menubar like it is supposed to do as a Mac application... and so on.

It was discussed as planned at FOSDEM. Not sure for when.

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