Vladimir Sedach

Have Emacs - Will Hack

March 12, 2009

Assorted Lisp news

Topic: Lisp

Last week I came across Bartosz Milewski's blog post criticizing the proposed implementation of futures in the forthcoming C++ standard. Milewski's chief dissatisfaction was the absence of a mechanism for composition. PCall (which I have written about before) was in a similar position, so I decided to implement a mechanism for non-deterministic composition and send in a patch. Milewski's blog post also spawned an excellent discussion about futures on Lambda the Ultimate.

Today I rewrote the Parenscript tutorial to use the recently released 1.0 version of Hunchentoot instead of AllegroServe. Edi Weitz and Hans Hübner did a major redesign for the 1.0 release, breaking interface compatibility with previous versions of Hunchentoot. The new interface provides greater Open Implementation capabilities, and makes a sharp demarcation between methods intended for OI and those for regular server programming. I like it.

Beware that if you are not using LispWorks, the 1.0 release of Hunchentoot depends on certain library capabilities (I suspect it is usocket but have not verified) that as of the time of writing have not made it into official releases. This means that if you get Hunchentoot dependencies via ASDF-Install it will likely not work (for me, it just instantly dropped all incoming connections). Use clbuild to get the latest repository versions of the dependencies.

Earlier last year I found out about Doug Hoyte's Let Over Lambda and after reading the sample chapters promptly got excited. I visited the site recently and found out that the book was published a few months ago. This morning my copy arrived in the mail - I will be posting a review here later. In the meantime you can obtain your own copy.

LispNYC is once again looking to participate in the Google Summer of Code program.

Just found out about lisp.ru. For a non-English generalist Lisp website the forum gets a fair amount of traffic.