[workinfunk]

Is SBCL winning in anything? One of my acquaintances, a Lisp zealot, convinced me to jump in and make my next project in SBCL. Short story, it was a joke. Nobody seems to have done any serious work in SBCL in over a decade. Basic things are either completely missing or broken. Clojure I can at least make working software in. The fact that you are putting SBCL up there with Clojure makes me wonder if you've ever used SBCL.

[zodmaner]

>Is SBCL winning in anything?

It is one of the most active implementation of Common Lisp (other being Clozure CL) and one of the fastest thanks to its support of optional type hinting (which it had long, long before gradual typing become in vogue recently). With some type hinting, it is possible to generate a code that's almost as fast as C (in certain cases, of course, but still much better than other implementations).

>Nobody seems to have done any serious work in SBCL in over a decade.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by this?

SBCL releases a new version that contains both enhancements and bugfixes every couple of months, with the latest version (version 1.4.9, released on June 28, 2018, ~5 days ago) came one just one month after the previous version, 1.4.8, so I really don't understand what you mean when you said that no one "seems to have done any serious work in SBCL in over a decade".

You can also see all previous releases and their changlog here: http://www.sbcl.org/all-news.html.

Or did you meant to say that no one use SBCL to do serious work? Well, with some googling, I'm sure you'll be able to find that, while not many, there are companies that use SBCL (and other Common Lisp implementations) in production and other non-trivial works (not to mention various freelancers who use SBCL to put foods on the table). Some of those companies are also involves with the development of SBCL as well.

>Basic things are either completely missing or broken.

Care to list them? One of the strength of SBCL is that the devs are very responsive, especially to bug reports, so I'm sure they would be more than happy to fix the problems that you encountered.

[workinfunk]

Sure, here's 2 off the top of my head: Package management is a non-thing in SBCL. It just doesn't exist. Have fun downloading 6-to-12 year old zipballs. The basic HTTP server, hunchentoot IIRC, crashes after it serves its first request. Hope your favicon.ico was a good one!

[zodmaner]

>Package management is a non-thing in SBCL. It just doesn't exist.

When is the last time you use SBCL, or Common Lisp in general? Quicklisp (https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/), which is a modern package manager that supports resolving dependency and works across almost all currently active Common Lisp implementations (and not just SBCL), has been a thing for years now.

>The basic HTTP server, hunchentoot IIRC, crashes after it serves its first request

Would love to see the backtrace to see the reasons (and to submit a bug report if the issue warrant one), as from my experience Hunchentoot is very stable. I regularly used it in my freelance jobs without any issues.

[jlg23]

Not sured what you tried to do, but over the last decade I've done a lot of commercial lisp programming and wonder what is "completely missing or broken".

EDIT: always in SBCL and CCL

[armitron]

ITA software [1] (acquired by Google) runs on SBCL. ITA people work on SBCL full time. Maybe you should tell us what is broken and/or completely missing? I have this feeling you've never used Common Lisp and are making things up as you go..

[1] https://www.itasoftware.com/

[workinfunk]

LOL, buddy, what grade are you in? You're just gonna use my diss back at me? Weak.

[dang]

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Would you please not create accounts to do that with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[olzd]

Latest release is June 28, 2018. SBCL REPL kinda sucks by itself but nobody uses it that way.

[kamaal]

>>Basic things are either completely missing or broken.

What are those things? Name them.

[blue1]

what's wrong with sbcl?