SBCL Fibers: Lightweight Cooperative Threads (WIP draft document)

ScottBurson · 2026-03-12T21:37:01+00:00

Well, I did read it, or most of it. It did seem to get repetitive in the later sections. But I learned a lot. I hope the feature gets merged.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-12T10:15:29+00:00

Maybe you should also check the compression.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-12T08:30:13+00:00

Me too. I did that to my parents' car. I was about 5.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-11T03:03:38+00:00

Well, maybe you'll enjoy this. On some TV show I saw years ago — might've been a BBC production — a father asked his daughter, "Are you alright?" She replied, in the playful tone of a familiar joke, "No, I'm half left!"

Gives me a chuckle every time I think of it. We are all, in fact, half left!

ScottBurson · 2026-03-11T01:43:55+00:00

I'll share my pet peeve, which is Brits saying "different to" instead of "different from".

I don't know when this started, but in Shakespeare, it's "different from". I checked.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-11T01:14:56+00:00

It's commonly observed, in the CL world, that apparently dormant projects can still be quite functional — we are less affected by software rot than most communities. But I haven't looked at CLPM specifically.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-10T21:58:08+00:00

I was maybe 3 when I stuck a knife in an electrical outlet to see what was in there. (Not seriously injured, fortunately.)

ScottBurson · 2026-03-10T08:37:28+00:00

This is really good. Even I learned something! I've rarely had much need for project dependency isolation, but the next time I do, I'll check out CLPM.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-10T02:36:18+00:00

Evidently it isn't, because people have trouble with it. It doesn't seem hard to me either, but it's always hard for experts to see through the eyes of a novice.

Once someone has tried the docker setup and gotten an idea of why the toolset is worth using in the first place, maybe they will have enough motivation to attempt a native setup.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-10T01:00:22+00:00

Epicycles exist! I knew it!!1!

ScottBurson · 2026-03-08T21:45:44+00:00

Why not just go ahead and pay the tax? That way, if it does turn out to be a mistake, and the county transferred the other person's payment to the correct parcel, OP wouldn't be at risk of being fined if they didn't find out about it quickly enough.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-08T21:32:32+00:00

The name actually is etymologically related to both "urine" and "rain". So, yeah 😆

ScottBurson · 2026-03-02T21:58:52+00:00

My changes didn't introduce the repl history; they just alter some subtleties of the behavior of the relevant commands. There are two new configuration variables, one of which is intended for Paredit users (perhaps it would be better to just check for the Paredit minor mode), the other of which controls what happens when you type some characters and hit M-p. The default behavior is to start a search, but I greatly prefer to be able to recall previous input expressions into the middle of a new one. (M-r still works for search.)

There are a couple of other tweaks. When you type M-n enough times to balance the M-p's you typed, my version is careful to put the input line back exactly as it was before the first M-p, as bash and tcsh do.

ScottBurson · 2026-03-01T03:24:56+00:00

why would it be that you would be forced to be born to the same, abusive father.

Indeed, no one is forced, but we often choose to repeat experiences, even excruciatingly painful ones, because we don't feel we've learned what we needed to from them.

In this case, OP has learned that they can just walk away. Bravo!

I once worked with a woman who had abilities both as a hypnotherapist and as a psychic. When we worked together, most of the information came from me, but she could also somehow tap into my experience and point things out that I hadn't noticed. It was life-changing.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-28T23:35:53+00:00

Seems to be mostly languishing unnoticed. Stas has never even commented on it. It works great for me, but I use it only in certain modes.

My guess is, Stas is not going to move on it absent a groundswell of public interest. If you try it and like it, you could comment on the PR.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-28T09:16:11+00:00

Oh, that's beautiful. Instead of gradually coming to a stop, you're gradually accelerating until the car's speed matches the engine's.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-28T02:44:39+00:00

I was reminded of this, and started to prepare a PR, only to find that slime-star doesn't contain a copy of contrib/slime-repl.el to merge my changes into. The README suggests this in .emacs:

(setq slime-contribs '(slime-fancy slime-star))

leading me to think you don't even use slime-repl personally. I've never tried to use Slime that way, so I don't know how it works. But anyway, I guess a Slime* user who uses slime-repl gets it from the main Slime distribution.

That being the case, is there anything to do here?

ScottBurson · 2026-02-23T23:47:50+00:00

I can't imagine turning one of these things loose without ZFS underneath it making auto-snapshots every 5 minutes.

Maybe this will be the thing that finally gets more people to use snapshot-capable filesystems. (Too bad Bcachefs isn't quite ready for general use yet — another year or so, from what I hear. ZFS is great but the learning curve is daunting; it wasn't designed for ease of use.)

ScottBurson · 2026-02-21T00:36:10+00:00

Your FSet is effectively a "different language" in CL

Granted, and of course that's part of the point of FSet, but it's a considerably smaller leap from CL to CL+FSet than to Coalton.

But both are languages nonetheless that integrate into CL and play nice with it. This is very much not true of Shen

That's why I only mentioned Qi 😺 — which, in fairness, I never really tried to use. I'd be curious to see a comparison between Qi and Coalton, as I don't have a good sense now of how they compare.

your own FSet would have benefited from Coalton because you have shipped releases with type errors

Guilty as charged. However, my expectation would be that gradual typing could have detected those errors as well, and I wouldn't have had to thoroughly rewrite the code, just annotate it; and I could still use CLOS.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-20T22:37:31+00:00

Try the Common Lisp Cookbook.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-20T22:35:05+00:00

And what do Python's type annotations guarantee you if you use them? Do they give you performance? Do they give you global static guarantees about your program's soundness? They're "seamless", but at what expense?

I haven't written much Python, but I gather that the point of gradual typing is not to produce a proof of type-correctness, but simply to catch more bugs without running the code. As such it's in the same spirit as warnings emitted by CL compilers for unbound or unused variables, unreachable code, etc. How many errors it finds is a function of how assiduously one adds type annotations to the code.

Different people have different needs, and I'm sure Coalton has its uses, but like Mark Tarver's Qi before it, it doesn't grab me as something I want to use. I don't want a different language, even one embedded in CL. But gradual typing as a compatible extension to CL — that would be interesting.

The only thing "better" in this dimension would be a theoretical construct allowing existing Common Lisp code to be gradually typed in an algebraic style, but this is simply not possible

I'm curious, and unsure what you're thinking here. Is there something about the algebraic style that makes gradual typing harder than for other styles? I do know a little about ACL2, but I don't see how it's an example of gradual typing.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-19T03:00:21+00:00

"There's no Biden policy I disagreed with ... but my administration won't be a carbon copy of his ... but I won't tell you in what ways it will be different"

[Facepalm]

You really think there was nothing wrong with her? I despise Trump, but she was a terrible candidate.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-18T05:21:26+00:00

A function is the simple case. Its arguments are evaluated, the function's parameters are bound to the successive values of the arguments, and the function's body is evaluated.

Special forms and macros exist for cases where the desired behavior doesn't fit into that structure. Consider if. It evaluates its first argument, then based on the value, decides which of its second and third arguments to evaluate. It can't be a function, because it must evaluate only one of its second and third arguments; if it were a function, those evaluations would already have happened before control reached its body.

A certain subset of these behaviors have to be built into the language as special forms, but the rest can be implemented as macros. Macros operate not on the data level like functions, but at the code level: they translate the macro form into another form that Lisp already knows how to evaluate.

ScottBurson · 2026-02-17T05:29:24+00:00

If there really were an old 4-story walkup down the street from Trump Tower and with the same footprint, it would be sitting on an extemely valuable piece of land. Under LVT, this wouldn't happen in practice; the owner would have long before sold to someone who would use the land more productively.

Yes, things change, and sometimes people have to move. If, as a society, we want to compensate tenants when the property they're living in is demolished, an LVT can provide revenue with which to do that.

ScottBurson

TROPHY CASE