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by dmkolobov 359 days ago
If I had to guess:

1. lack of native GC, you had to roll your own by providing a runtime.

2. lack of tail-call elimination in V1 of the spec. This essentially forces you to trampoline everything.
1 comments
stassats 359 days ago
> lack of tail-call elimination

But lisp doesn't need TCO.

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dreamcompiler 359 days ago
Common Lisp doesn't technically require TCO but Scheme does.

IMHO a Common Lisp without TCO is not a serious tool because I cannot write tail-recursive code with it.

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wavemode 359 days ago
Typical programming style in Common Lisp is procedural, not functional.

The CL spec doesn't guarantee tail-call elimination, and most CL implementations don't guarantee it either (it could be on or off depending on the current optimization level). So most people don't bother relying on it.

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dreamcompiler 358 days ago
True. My CL code is atypical because I prefer functional style to iterative style. I know how to use declarations to turn on TCO for implementations that support it, which is most of the big ones. ABCL being a notable exception.
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bevr1337 359 days ago
Whoa, what a surprising fact! I had not considered TCO in LISP was "nice to have." That's a good example where it's easy to hack but hard to make production ready.
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