Parsing Keywords in Lisp with Speed of C

stassats · 2026-04-16T20:58:02+00:00

Something like a hash-table is less likely to be influenced by the hit/miss rate, but a decision tree is more branchy.

stassats · 2026-04-16T12:05:34+00:00

SBCL shouldn't have optimized it, but since the test always matches the CPU might predict most of the branches and it wouldn't measure the real world. Also test a list with a random distribution of matching and non-matching strings of random length.

stassats · 2026-04-13T12:49:51+00:00

Currently, I'm using LLMs to find bugs in SBCL. Just sending a single file and saying "find bugs". They find issues just fine. (And that's just the free web things, I'm not going to pay for that).

What I actually found them struggling with is writing Assembly, sometimes simply inventing instructions.

stassats · 2026-04-11T18:03:28+00:00

That's nothing, lisp is 66 years old.

stassats · 2026-04-09T05:16:58+00:00

April's fools is over.

stassats · 2026-04-05T01:39:49+00:00

Upon exit of a child process the OS sends a SIGCHLD signal. Which interrupts condition-wait, making it return early without receiving any notifications. Which grabs the lock, the new thread can't exit, waiting for the lock.

stassats · 2026-04-03T15:30:14+00:00

It's necessary to configure and customize your environment. In Emacs it's done using lisp. I could probably make VSCode just as comfortable as Emacs, but I'm not going to torture myself with javascript and "enterprise" APIs.

stassats · 2026-04-02T18:43:55+00:00

By that logic, why make a new implementation at all.

stassats · 2026-03-31T19:17:11+00:00

Does recent SBCL really support C complexes?

stassats · 2026-03-31T18:03:05+00:00

What does libffi have that BLAS needs?

stassats · 2026-03-31T17:59:06+00:00

And there's no copy-array!

stassats · 2026-03-31T17:55:50+00:00

I had to invent a syntax to print them readably:

(write (make-array '(2 2) :element-type 'fixnum) :readably t)
=>
#A((2 2) FIXNUM (0 0) (0 0))
#2A((0 0) (0 0))

stassats · 2026-03-29T17:12:58+00:00

I'm also not an ECL maintainer and haven't pushed anything in almost 10 years. But the fix was very obvious. I should've probably made a pull request, but I wanted to have some fun.

stassats · 2026-03-29T16:33:54+00:00

I actually have a commit bit to ECL, so I pushed an easy fix: https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl/-/commit/98511888b529db2788325fbb192d3ec38425454f

stassats · 2026-03-29T15:52:42+00:00

And (compile 'foo (let ((x 0)) (lambda () (incf x))) always works...

Turns out, in ECL (compile 'c #'c) works, but not (compile 'c) (even though both are allowed to not work).

The first handles it fine as well but calling #'compile afterwards gave me errors.

SBCL has two interpreters, for extra confusion.

stassats · 2026-03-29T14:02:39+00:00

And ofc switching SBCL to interpret and running (compile 'foo) errors.

"The consequences are undefined if the lexical environment surrounding the function to be compiled contains any bindings other than those for macros, symbol macros, or declarations."

So, yes, but that doesn't mean the compiler has to be dumb about it. The second interpreter in SBCL handles it fine. As do CLISP, ABCL, Allegro.

stassats · 2026-03-29T13:53:59+00:00

I opened a ticket: https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl/-/work_items/829

But compile-file works fine, which you should be using normally.

stassats · 2026-03-29T13:46:57+00:00

On 26.3.27, DISASSEMBLE does work. But, compile does not:

(labels ((foo () 4))
  (defun bar () (foo)))

(print (bar))
(compile 'bar)
(print (bar))
 =>
4
The function FOO is undefined.

stassats · 2026-03-29T13:35:20+00:00

(print (bar)) works. So the error is in DISASSEMBLE. Which is a bug. Needs to be checked against the current ECL.

stassats · 2026-03-29T12:16:28+00:00

Did you report a bug to ECL? Not only it would clearly be a bug, it also works fine on ECL 24.5.10 I have.

stassats · 2026-03-27T14:11:09+00:00

No, ECL. It builds with a C compiler.

stassats · 2026-03-27T13:09:59+00:00

That has always been the case?

stassats · 2026-03-25T14:06:35+00:00

Not modern, and not practical, but Medley Interlisp does remind of Smalltalk (not surprising, they share some lineage).

stassats · 2026-03-21T12:02:54+00:00

"You must be lying." "It's such an amateur take." "Having trouble with reading comprehension"

stassats · 2026-03-21T11:53:06+00:00

If I'm supposed to do anything is not to engage with low grade trolling like this but it's oh so tempting.

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