Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET

(github.com)

135 points | by reikonomusha 2 days ago

13 comments

  • Syzygies 1 hour ago
    Any benchmarks? I have a combinatorial enumeration comparison project where the .NET jit optimized my hot loops for F# to in some cases matching Rust performance. F# is inspired by OCaml, and for me F# runs twice as fast.

    Scala got a face lift where indentation replaces syntax, a modern poetry look many of us can't live without. It is entirely practical to eliminate most parentheses from Lisp (I have written thousands of lines of Scheme this way, hands down my favorite code to read), but doing so will lead to a tribal swarm attack. It is also easy to train Common Lisp to lay off the caps, but any stock installation greets users with an old man shouting (GET OFF (MY LAWN)).

    The idea of Lisp is pure genius. One wonders where we would be today if any Lisp took a more pragmatic attitude towards encouraging adoption.

    • manoDev 7 minutes ago
      I feel CLISP is pragmatic (it’s both low level and high level, multi purpose, has a formal specification, is a standard), but the world just changed too much around it.
    • jonnytran 1 hour ago
      Have you tried Clojure?
  • algorithmsRcool 55 minutes ago
    Not my project, but I feel mention of IronScheme is appropriate. Leppie has been maintaining it for many years now.

    [0] https://github.com/IronScheme/IronScheme

  • d-us-vb 6 hours ago
    Dotcl sounds like a lisp macro that interprets TCL. :D
    • jnpnj 5 hours ago
      hehe. alternatively dotnil would have sounded closer to dotnet while hinting at lisp terminology and history
    • anthk 4 hours ago
      Given how simple TCL is you would probably write a parser in a day...

      JimTCL (jimsh interpreter) is not 100% TCL compatible and I just used 'source qcomplex.tcl' from it's big brother TCL and now I can do complex number operations in the spot. With just a simple file, no libraries, no nothing.

  • Rochus 1 day ago
    This is amazing. How long did it take you to implement it, i.e. reach that high level of Ansi test conformance? Have you been able to reuse concepts e.g. from ABCL?
    • guenthert 5 hours ago
      Yeah, pity that the early history seems to have been lost.
  • SomeHacker44 7 hours ago
    Awesome! Has a MonoGame integration sample. Am curious to see if it will work with Godot or Unity. New weekend project...
  • v9v 7 hours ago
    There's also Bike for CL/.NET interop: https://github.com/Lovesan/bike
  • djha-skin 3 hours ago
    I have recently blogged that AI and Common Lisp don't mix, but I've come to the opposite conclusion lately. AI evens the playing field between large teams and single developers. Now all the lone wolves in cl will be able to do large things, like a .net implementation or a yaml parser. I heard one guy say he was using AI to write a c complete in common lisp. I wonder if AI was used here or not.
    • jksmith 1 hour ago
      Use python or whatever to build the llm, use lisp to explore and infer from the edges of what the llm has to offer. I don't do anything but lisp these days. Been waiting my whole career to be at this point. I'll never "write" a line of C# again. Just my taste and pref.
    • pjmlp 2 hours ago
      Had it not been for UNIX taking over the Lisp workstations market, followed by the first AI winter, people would be using LispTorch today, and there wouldn't have been such a waste coming up with endless ways to speed up Python, and efforts like Mojo wouldn't even be a thing.
      • Pay08 1 hour ago
        Not really the "fault" of UNIX. The Lisp workstations would have been just as unpopular without it. They were insanely expensive and the idea of a workstation was ahead of its time, not to mention the other "unneeded" extras like GUIs, a mouse, and the photo editing and 3D modelling suites. It was plainly uneconomical.
        • pjmlp 58 minutes ago
          UNIX was only cheap because AT&T was forbidden to profit from it, had it not been the case, it would have been a proprietary closed source OS, exactly at similar price points.

          The proof being the graphical UNIX workstations from Cray, SGI, Sun, NeXT that came later into the market.

          • Pay08 49 minutes ago
            The dimension you're missing here is that most of the Lisp OSs were single-user (AFAIK initially all of them were but some gained multi-user support later) in a period when timeshare was king. Not to mention that the hardware itself cost multiple times more to manufacture.
  • cjbgkagh 5 hours ago
    Neat, I see AOT, will this be able to target WASM? I’m guessing there will be a mode that doesn’t use reflection emit since AOT doesn’t support that? I would check myself but I’m away from my computer.
  • register 4 hours ago
    Kudos, this is what I was looking for. Time to add dynamic "scripting" to my .net projects.
  • aboardRat4 5 hours ago
    Does it have tail recursion?
    • runevault 4 hours ago
      If nothing else dotnet has TCO IL operations (C# doesn't compile down to them last I knew but F# does) so in theory shouldn't be hard to add.
      • pjmlp 2 hours ago
        MSIL was designed to support plenty of languages, including C and C++, which WebAssembly advocates tend to never mention.

        As such there are plenty of MSIL and CLR capabilities not yet fully exposed in C#.

        One of the improvements in C# during the last decade, has been exposing low level coding abilities into C#, which is nothing more than taking advantage of those primitives originally designed for C and C++ support.

        Likewise, .NET also had support back in 2001 for FP languages, thus TCO.

        https://news.microsoft.com/source/2001/10/22/massive-industr...

    • guenthert 5 hours ago
      I'm pretty sure it does. I would even think that it tries to optimize such, as a recent check-in comment claims improvements of TCO.
      • 2ndorderthought 3 hours ago
        A lisp without tail recursion would be a sad thing.
        • aidenn0 1 hour ago
          It's not unusual for lisp interpreters to lack TCO. Also the (relative) popularity of dynamic binding in Common Lisp reduced the opportunities for TCO.

          There's not really a consensus in the parts of the CL community that I'm familiar with on whether or not code relying on TCO is idiomatic or not.

        • shawn_w 1 hour ago
          Common Lisp does not require implementations preform tail call optimization in general, or even in just the limited case of tail recursion.
  • pjmlp 7 hours ago
    Great! A new toy on my toolbox.

    Kudos on the implementation.

  • Pay08 6 hours ago
    I was just wondering the other day if this exists. Great timing.
  • freedomben 7 hours ago
    Unfortunate near naming collision for people using doctl (the Digital Ocean CLI). I can foresee a lot of shell muscle memory causing me to use the wrong tool :-D

    Really cool project! Love seeing CL work it's way into as many envs as possible