Clasp – Lisp on LLVM | Hacker News Reader

Clasp – Lisp on LLVM

github.com

46 pointseatonphil12 comments

I really hope LLVM becomes what the JVM has partially become: a meta eco system where new languages can be made because they don't have to spawn an entire ecosystem, but can grow on an already existing system.

That said with everything moving to the browser (or more correctly a zero install thickis client with remote storage) I am not sure it matter than much as more and more of the work seems to be done in browsers.

> with everything moving to the browser [...] I am not sure it matter than much as more and more of the work seems to be done in browsers.

With asm.js as a potential LLVM target, I don't think it will matter. The browser could just serve as another compilation target with a specific foreign language interface.

I've been fantasizing about language for LLVM that would be a lisp that compiled to the intermediate representation (IR) emitted by the LLVM frontend. The main feature of the language would be that ANY code that can be compiled with LLVM to its IR would be usable as a library, no matter the language it was written in. This would be a true glue language.

This just reminds me of how much I'd like to see Clojure on LLVM also.

PixieLang exists, and probably does most of what you'd want: fast boot, FFI and Clojure-style LISP.

Thank you so much for this reference. The moment I grokked Clojure, I immediately thought "someone should port this to LLVM". The JVM is awful in a thousand ways, and it is quite surprising to me that Rich Hickey would devote so much time to getting many details right but get this big one wrong.

Trying it out now ;)

As much as I don't like Clojure on top of the JVM, I don't think you can say that the man who created the 3rd seriously successful dialect of Lisp made a big mistake/

I count "mainline Lisp", which ended with Common Lisp, and Scheme as the other two; others might count Autodesk's and Gnu Emacs' embedded Lisps.

Clojure is even showing signs of becoming mainstream in a way no Lisp has been since mainline Lisp through sometime in the '80s, not counting Scheme's niches in language research and (temporary? one) education. Or perhaps even better.

I view the JVM choice as a pragmatic choice to encourage wider adoption rather than a technical choice. Possibly it eased implementation too having a high-quality GC, but overall the drawbacks are quite severe, because they outright preclude Clojure from being used in situations outside the "long-running server process" use case.

It is even possible that he viewed the JVM as a stopgap to be abstracted out when and if the language got popular. It seems they are moving in this direction with ClojureScript. Clearly he made this decision thoughtfully and consciously because he was an expert in C++ before he ever wrote a line of Clojure interpreter, and could have made it native if he wanted.

But the argument "Clojure is successful, therefore all his decisions must have been optimal" (caracaturing you a little bit) is obviously false. Replace "Clojure" with "Linux" or even "Windows" and you see the fallacy.

Some advice please: which OS should I build for, to have the easiest experience kicking the tires? OS X or Ubuntu 14.04?

I still really enjoy Common Lisp (even though it seems like I spend my time with Clojure or Haskell) and Clasp, when it is mature, will be a good incentive to use Common Lisp for more development use cases. (It is easy enough to build stand alone executables with SBCL, CCL, and Franz, but having a smaller executable would be really good, if indeed the executables would be smaller with Clasp).

I developed it on OS X so that's a good choice. The README on github lists the linux distributions that it's been compiled on.

Why there is something new about lisp here every fucking day???

Because it's the only language worth talking about :-)

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