[nickpsecurity]

Author's point wasn't that Common LISP couldn't do such a thing. It's whether Common LISP's issues and troubles are justified in process vs examples like Racket cited. How hard would it have been to do your project in Racket which seems to be able to do whatever Common LISP can do and with more consistency in language?

[jgw]

Haven't spent enough time with Racket, but my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that you won't squeeze as much performance out of it, and performance is quite important. I'm also quite partial to Lisp's condition system -- I don't believe Schemes can support something that comprehensive (a trade-off for having nice things like call/cc, I think?)

[tbirdz]

Chez scheme was recently released as free software. Not sure how it compares to SBCL, but it blows all the other scheme implementations out of the water: https://www.nexoid.at/tmp/scheme-benchmark-r7rs.html

https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme

[jgw]

Interesting! I'm wide open to more Scheme in my life - so thanks for the pointers.

[nickpsecurity]

It's not just an impressive Scheme that I plan to try but it's history from 8-bit to modern implementations was a fun read. Many clever tradeoffs made. See here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210931

[nickpsecurity]

Hmm. That's a good point. It didn't benchmark as well as Common LISP last I looked. Another time, Racket developers updated the compiler and improved a benchmark on a spot due to complaints on a forum. I rarely see that haha. It would still have to be tested to ensure performance is within what you need.

"I'm also quite partial to Lisp's condition system"

You're not the only one. Many like that. It's been a while since I used Common LISP. Here's Racket's condition system or a brief intro to it below. Is there anything specific that it seems weaker on?

https://docs.racket-lang.org/r6rs/r6rs-lib-std/r6rs-lib-Z-H-...