So this is less of a normal blog post for me and more like a guide of a bunch of the small things I’ve been picking up lately.

Background

The tl;dr is that I’ve been trying to return to using Common Lisp more as my main side-project language, since I’ve been feeling stagnant mostly using Haskell as my side-language since college. I originally learned CL around the same time back then in the 00s, but other than working through some books and writing small things like little servers for personal use I didn’t use it a ton.

Now that I’m using it more, there’s lots of little things I’ve been learning that I think wouldn’t be obvious to someone just trying to start out with the language: tricks, conventions, resources, links, &c. So I thought I might be able to save someone else some time if they want to delve into this world. I’ll be updating this post as I learn more or if people offer suggestions.

A site that’s a lot more in-depth that what I’m writing here is Articulate Lisp. This post isn’t a tutorial but more like a quick reference for where to get started.

Compilers

The primary two compilers that seem to be the most actively maintained are

• Steel Bank Common Lisp which is the one I’m mostly familiar with and

• Armed Bear Common Lisp which is an implementation that runs on top of the JVM, which automatically draws comparisons with Clojure though ABCL is much much older.

  I can say that SBCL was the compiler I learned on back in the day and I’m using it now and it works amazing. I haven’t used it much on Windows but I know fairly recent versions work on Windows. There are other compilers and if someone has opinions about things more obscure than

IDE

Emacs + SLIME still seems to be one of the best environments for developing in Common Lisp. In fact, I feel like there was more competition years ago, but on the other hand SLIME has gotten even better and easier to use than it used to be. The links on the homepage will get you set up with an up-to-date slime install in no time.

Package management

I remember back in the day there was a lot of talk about how to handle package management for common lisp, building off of the venerable ASDF system. Today, Quicklisp seems to be exclusive winner.

You can follow the instructions on the site to get set up or you can use Portacle, linked below.

You can load packages with (ql:quickload "systemname") but if you’re using quicklisp please note there’s some slight complications to using buildapp to make stand-alone executables.

Learning the language

Good news! Peter Seibel’s book Practical Common Lisp is still available online. Since the basics of the language haven’t changed, it’s a good reference for basic syntax but it also is built around lisp implementations that haven’t been updated in a very long time. I haven’t checked which practicum still work as intended, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were issues with Allegro related libraries. The recommended quick-install, Lisp in a Box, also is deprecated. Fortunately, there are other quick installers that are actively maintained.

A book that is really good is Edi Weitz’s Common Lisp Recipes. I borrowed this book from my library and after skimming it managed to build a small web server that ran on my rpi3 that connected together a bunch of my media tools and was controllable from my phone. It’s a seriously well-written and clear book. It’s not a language tutorial, but that’s what you can use Practical Common Lisp for.

The Common Lisp Cookbook is a great free resource too, providing some nice current examples of how to do common tasks. In particular, I think its overview of web programming in common lisp is fantastic.

Quick installation

If you like the idea of emacs + slime + sbcl + quicklisp there’s an easy installer called Portacle.

Building executables

So I know that some people will argue that having a standalone executable is against the spirit of lisp programming. But! I really like having something I can run on the commandline. Thankfully, the program Buildapp is really useful for making executables out of sbcl.

However, there’s a couple of caveats. First, if you want to just compile a file you use the --load FILENAME option, which weirdly isn’t obvious from the documentation. The next is that if you want to load libraries from Quicklisp, you need to do something a little roundabout. You can follow this answer from stackoverflow by the creator of both Buildapp and Quicklisp, but I also want to throw out that you can create the manifest file from within slime by running the (ql:write-asdf-manifest-file "quicklisp-manifest.txt") command from Xach’s answer at the REPL. It might not be obvious, but you don’t have to do it by calling sbcl at the command line.

Useful libraries

Expect this segment to change as I discover/remember cool libraries

bit-smasher: a library for easily dealing with bit arrays