I’ve been writing more and more Common Lips recently and while I reflected a bunch on the experience in a recent post that I recently followed up on .

Why Ecosystems Matter

Most of my thinking and analysis of CL comes down to the ecosystem: the language has some really compelling (and fun!) features, so the question really comes down to the ecosystem. There are two main reasons to care about ecosystems in programming languages:

  • a vibrant ecosystem cuts down the time that an individual developer or team has to spend doing infrastructural work, to get started. Ecosystems provide everything from libraries for common tasks as well as conventions and established patterns for the big fundamental application choices, not to mention things like easily discoverable answers to common problems.

    The more time between “I have an idea” to “I have running (proof-of-concept quality) code running,” matters so much. Everything is possible to a point, but the more friction between “idea” and “working prototype” can be a big problem.

  • a bigger and more vibrant ecosystem makes it more tenable for companies/sponsors (of all sizes) to choose to use Common Lisp for various projects, and there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here, admittedly. Companies and sponsors want to be confidence that they’ll be able to efficiently replace engineers if needed, integrate or lisp components into larger ecosystems, or be able to get support problems. These are all kind of intangible (and reasonable!) and the larger and more vibrant the ecosystem the less risk there is.

    In many ways, recent developments in technology more broadly make lisp slightly more viable, as a result of making it easier to build applications that use multiple languages and tools. Things like microservices, better generic deployment orchestration tools, greater adoption of IDLs (including swagger, thrift and GRPC,) all make language choice less monolithic at the organization level.

Great Things

I’ve really enjoyed working with a few projects and tools. I’ll probably write more about these individually in the near future, but in brief:

  • chanl provides. As a current/recovering Go programmer, this library is very familiar and great to have. In some ways, the API provides a bit more introspection, and flexibility that I’ve always wanted in Go.
  • lake is a buildsystem tool, in the tradition of make, but with a few additional great features, like target namespacing, a clear definition between “file targets” and “task targets,” as well as support for SSH operations, which makes it a reasonable replacement for things like fabric, and other basic deployment tools.
  • cl-docutils provides the basis for a document processing system. I’m particularly partial because I’ve been using the python (reference) implementation for years, but the implementation is really quite good and quite easy to extend.
  • roswell is really great for getting started with CL, and also for making it possible to test library code against different implementations and versions of the language. I’m a touch iffy on using it to install packages into it’s own directory, but it’s pretty great.
  • ASDF is the “buildsystem” component of CL, comparable to setuptools in python, and it (particularly the latest versions,) is really great. I like the ability to produce binaries directly from asdf, and the “package-inferred” is a great addition (basically, giving python-style automatic package discovery.)
  • There’s a full Apache Thrift implementation. While I’m not presently working on anything that would require a legit RPC protocol, being able to integrate CL components into larger ecosystem, having the option is useful.
  • Hunchensocket adds websockets! Web sockets are a weird little corner of any stack, but it’s nice to be able to have the option of being able to do this kind of programming. Also CL seems like a really good platform to do
  • make-hash makes constructing hash tables easier, which is sort of needlessly gawky otherwise.
  • ceramic provides bridges between CL and Electron for delivering desktop applications based on web technologies in CL.

I kept thinking that there wouldn’t be good examples of various things, (there’s a Kafka driver! there’s support for various other Apache ecosystem components,) but there are, and that’s great. There’s gaps, of course, but fewer, I think, than you’d expect.

The Dark Underbelly

The biggest problem in CL is probably discoverability: lots of folks are building great tools and it’s hard to really know about the projects.

I thought about phrasing this as a kind of list of things that would be good for supporting bounties or something of the like. Also if I’ve missed something, please let me know! I’ve tried to look for a lot of things, but discovery is hard.

Quibbles

  • rove doesn’t seem to work when multi-threaded results effectively. It’s listed in the readme, but I was able to write really trivial tests that crashed the test harness.
  • Chanl would be super lovely with some kind of concept of cancellation (like contexts in Go,) and while it’s nice to have a bit more thread introspection, given that the threads are somewhat heavier weight, being able to avoid resource leaks seems like a good plan.
  • There doesn’t seem to be any library capable of producing YAML formated data. I don’t have a specific need, but it’d be nice.
  • it would be nice to have some way of configuring the quicklisp client to be able to prefer quicklisp (stable) but also using ultralisp (or another source) if that’s available.
  • Putting the capacity in asdf to produce binaries easily is great, and the only thing missing from buildapp/cl-launch is multi-entry binaries. That’d be swell. It might also be easier as an alternative to have support for some git-style sub-commands in a commandline parser (which doesn’t easily exist at the moment'), but one-command-per-binary, seems difficult to manage.
  • there are no available implementations of a multi-reader single-writer mutex, which seems like an oversite, and yet, here we are.

Bigger Projects

  • There are no encoders/decoders for data formats like Apache Parquet, and the protocol buffers implementation don’t support proto3. Neither of these are particular deal breakers, but having good tools dealing with common developments, lowers to cost and risk of using CL in more applications.
  • No support for http/2 and therefore gRPC. Having the ability to write software in CL with the knowledge that it’ll be able to integrate with other components, is good for the ecosystem.
  • There is no great modern MongoDB driver. There were a couple of early implementations, but there are important changes to the MongoDB protocol. A clearer interface for producing BSON might be useful too.
  • I’ve looked for libraries and tools to integrate and manage aspects of things like systemd, docker, and k8s. k8s seems easiest to close, as things like cube can be generated from updated swagger definitions, but there’s less for the others.
  • Application delievery remains a bit of an open. I’m particularly interested in being able to produce binaries that target other platforms/systems (cross compilation,) but there are a class of problems related to being able to ship tools once built.
  • I’m eagerly waiting and concerned about the plight of the current implementations around the move of ARM to Darwin, in the intermediate term. My sense is that the transition won’t be super difficult, but it seems like a thing.