Fun fact I learned from a Func Prog podcast: the name Steel Bank is a play on it&#x27;s origin as Carnegie-Mellon Common Lisp (Carnegie made his fortune in Steel, while Mellon did so with Banks):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sbcl.org&#x2F;history.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sbcl.org&#x2F;history.html</a>

Common lisp isn&#x27;t functional in that sense.

Common Lisp is pretty much the opposite of what people think of as functional nowadays. You&#x27;re constantly changing the image and everything is mutable.

&gt; Personally I think&#x2F;hope they would have earlier discoveries &#x2F; more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.Yeah, that, uh, doesn&#x27;t sound like Lisp

We wouldn&#x27;t have need such barbaric things in a lisp world. :pPersonally I think&#x2F;hope they would have earlier discoveries &#x2F; more broad usage of the deterministic systems like nix etc, which are built upon functional principles of immutability etc.Maybe the world would be guix&#x2F;Hurd!

You probably want Clog: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rabbibotton&#x2F;clog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rabbibotton&#x2F;clog</a>

Docker deploys is a bit like that I think. Overall, I think many languages and programming systems pick up pieces from each other nowadays. PHP almost by accident can be quite stateless. Yet it&#x27;s looking more like Java. Many things which could be deployed as an executable, are deployed as VM images. I&#x27;m sure we can come up with more things...

That (deployment is via a customized image) is the thing I find most awkward.Somewhere, I have a copy of a commercial LISP for Windows which would compile to an executable --- apparently this sort of thing is still possible, but it&#x27;s not widely known&#x2F;used, and sadly Jean-Marie Hullot&#x27;s &quot;SOS Interface&quot; for the Mac was co-opted to NeXTstep:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;denninginstitute.com&#x2F;itcore&#x2F;userinterface&#x2F;GUIHistory4.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;denninginstitute.com&#x2F;itcore&#x2F;userinterface&#x2F;GUIHistory...</a>I&#x27;d dearly love to see a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool using LISP w&#x2F; a nifty UI for working up a GUI which would compile to something easily deployed (maybe HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript) as a stand-alone&#x2F;single-file web application?

&gt; How would a kubernetesWe have a few services built in Clojure and we expose nrepl port on our pods in our SDEs, it&#x27;s enormously helpful to test and debug things on the fly, without having to re-deploy anything.

I&#x27;ve often thought that s-expression diff-viewers would be very nice tooling. I&#x27;ve also often wondered how easy it would be to just sling s-expressions across the wire to execute in another environment. What would modern infrastructure look like if you could just have lambdas running lambdas?

Not that different.AWS already has lots of AMI and docker are essentially image based.We would version whole images in something like git, and that&#x27;s all.

It&#x27;d look like Graal, which is a real thing you can use today.

The problem is that the type of developer you&#x27;re talking about is the kind who invents a thousand excuses about anything. It doesn&#x27;t begin and end with different languages. Using a different subset of their favorite language? A different toolchain? A radically different build process? You&#x27;ll hear plenty of whining about it. Even just moving them to a different codebase will make them miserable. You put a Lisp or a Prolog in front of them, and their attention flows upwards to the most general principles to whine about. The entire thing is that if you stick them into an unfamiliar environment, they will vocalize their discomfort through rationalization. I think most people who have led teams will know exactly what I&#x27;m talking about.Not that these people are necessarily bad at their jobs, but they&#x27;re definitely a personality type you should learn to identify so you can manage them properly.

I was fortunate enough to use lisp professionally for nearly 20 years. The only reason that gig ended was the unfortunate demise of the majority owner and founder, and his heirs selling the shop to a competitor that only wanted the customer database imported. Lisp was never the problem, nor particularily messy.On the contrary, we considered it a major reason we were able to build a quite successful stock broker and bank from scratch with a team of 4-6 people, who doubled as datacenter ops (we ran on-prem), internal tech support for the rest of the firm (~20 people) and 2.line customer support.We quite naturally converged on a set of internal libraries for various tasks. Understanding and fixing each other’s code was not a big deal.Coincidentally, our frontend was php. That was messier, and we conciously kept that layer as lean as possible.

I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code). If I were running a Lisp-based project, there would be project standards (like no exported macros without signoff, and a list of standard library dependencies), documentation requirements, and code review.The fact that Lisp is the “programmable programming language” doesn&#x27;t mean that every engineer should be inventing weird versions of while loops. What it does mean is that a skilled Lisp programmer can build a domain-specific language that substantially helps in development.One good example of this is the Crash Bandicoot games, along with the same studio&#x27;s Jax and Daxter, which were built with dialects of Lisp (yes, they had to compile the code, and take care with storage allocation, just like any other game code). Cisco hired Kent Dybvig, principal author of the Chez Scheme system, and open-sourced that software; I have no clue what they use it for, to be honest, but I assume that they had some reason for doing this. Companies using various Lisp languages have been documented in areas from fintech to quantum computing.

&gt;&gt; said: lovely, but I ain&#x27;t using it at work.Says who, you? Wrong. I use Common Lisp at work.edit: and not just use as in a side toy, design and writing software in CL is my primary responsibility. FWIW, at a FAANG!

&gt; The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.Have you like looked at anything in the Clojure ecosystem because this description makes no sense of any kind. Clojure has macros but less powerful than common lisp and Clojure code in the ecosystem tends to be small and understandable.

Lisp&#x27;s been around for 70 years at this point and hordes of developers tried it and said: lovely, but I ain&#x27;t using it at work.I&#x27;m strongly convinced, having used Scheme, CL, Racket, Clojure that Lisp is doomed to be (mostly) a hobby language.The very power of Lisp, macros, dynamic programming, reflection lead to a mess of an ecosystem where every single developer reinvents the wheel and nobody can understand yet another DSL invented by the next developer next to them.Racket&#x27;s theme of being a &quot;programming language for building programming languages&quot; is just the poster child of this naivety: I don&#x27;t want even more friction.What scales and works is simple and boring.That&#x27;s by the way why also Haskell has struggled forever. Beyond its dreadful DX, poor tooling and unacceptable compilation times, the language is just plagued by compiler extensions and every single developer reinventing its own abstractions.There was the simple haskell movement to just standardize around a set of extensions and conventions, but nope, these languages unavoidably attract people that want to stay in the ivory tower.Really, I love both lisps and haskell, but I would take a dreadful php over them every single day at work. No contest.

I wonder sometimes how the world would look like if lisp won and the unit of deployment was a lisp machine image, if that makes sense. How would a kubernetes optimized for lisp look like? How would AWS EC2 look like? etc.

Yeah I&#x27;m not sure why it&#x27;s not in the manual, as it&#x27;s had arena allocation support since at least 2.4.x, but basically:- use SB-VM:NEW-ARENA to make a new arena- use SB-VM:WITH-ARENA to redirect ordinary allocation into an existing arena like you would use WITH-OPEN-FILE or similar macrosThe only real doc is this internals note, and it doesn&#x27;t even cover NEW-ARENA which I guess is left as an exercise to the reader: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;doc&#x2F;internals-notes&#x2F;arena-allocation.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;doc&#x2F;internals-notes...</a>

If any SBCL dev is here, please add documentation for how to use the memory arena feature. The only doc is an very old proposal document.

And the very recent <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1v6kyyn&#x2F;so_they_say_lisp_is_slow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1v6kyyn&#x2F;so_they_say_l...</a>

No auto-vectorization yet, but you may find this illuminating: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stylewarning.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;nbody" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stylewarning.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;nbody</a>

Looks like you use it explicitly?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;contrib&#x2F;sb-simd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;sbcl&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;contrib&#x2F;sb-simd</a>

<pre><code> * the SB-SIMD contrib now supports ARM64. (Thanks to Sylvia Harrington)
 * AVX512 instructions are now supported on X86-64. (Thanks to Robert Smith and Arthur Miller)
 * additional support for SIMD instructions on ARM64 and X86-64. (Thanks to Arthur Miller)
</code></pre>
These seem like pretty awesome additions. Does anyone know how SIMD works in SBCL? Is this at the codegen layer? i.e. can it auto-vectorize or anything like that? Or are these intrinsics you have to explicitly ask for?

SBCL works fine on Windows. It used to display a warning about fragility at startup, but that was removed in version 2.0.3, 6 years ago, after already being obsolete for quite a while.CCL isn&#x27;t very actively maintained and currently doesn&#x27;t have an ARM64 port, but otherwise continues to work fine. I believe one reason people use it is that it compiles a bit faster than SBCL, at least in part by doing less optimization.

If memory serves, traditionally, CCL (Clozure Common Lisp [0]) had better support for Windows but SBCL was unbeatable for speed. Is that still the case?[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ccl.clozure.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ccl.clozure.com&#x2F;</a>

Anywhere is where exactly? I&#x27;ve been thinking of where I could use it for like 10 minutes, and I couldn&#x27;t come up with anything. Maybe a game engine or web services. It wouldn&#x27;t make much sense for any kind of desktop software or command line utilities that are supposed to start really fast and have minimal runtime.

I have a todo list longer than the Tour de France I want to tackle first!

CL can be used pretty much anywhere nowadays, even on the web with ECL wasm compilation.

Great to see the project is still going strong, I kinda want to try CL but I always feel like I don&#x27;t have a great use-case.

You might find this interesting:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43636230">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43636230</a>

more context beyond the changelog? what would you like to know?

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

I&#x27;m going pretty deep on Lisp on accident - can anybody give me more context on this?

Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7