_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Cl-kawa: Scheme on Java on Common Lisp
Per_Bothner wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
What a blast from the past! I too remember with pleasure the days
working with Anthony Green (and others) at Cygnus. I like to boast that
(apart from Java) Kawa Scheme is the oldest compiler-based language
implementation still available for the JVM.
mark_l_watson wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
Github user atgreen has a large number of really interesting Common
Lisp projects: [1] I am a fan.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/atgreen
shawn_w wrote 20 hours 59 min ago:
The newer ones are mostly vibecoded if that matters to you.
stared wrote 1 day ago:
I had to check if the creator is Polish, as "ciekawa" means
"interesting". But apparently, just a coincidence.
tmtvl wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
Well, GNU Kawa is named after the Polish word for coffee (going with
a play on Java rather than a play on Scheme like Guile and Larceny
EDIT: and Gambit went with).
cloudbonsai wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
Coincidentally, Chi-kawa is a very popular anime character in Japan.
[1] It's a portmanteau of "Chiisai" (small) and "Kawaii" (cute).
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiikawa
varjag wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps someone could port Arc to Kawa! Then the whole contraption
could run HN on SBCL in a roundabout way.
atgreen wrote 1 day ago:
Here's something I wrote about this work:
HTML [1]: https://atgreen.github.io/repl-yell/posts/cl-kawa/
atgreen wrote 1 day ago:
If you are interested in this, you might also be interested to learn
that I also got clojure running on SBCL via OpenLDK. See [1] .
Regarding LLM-usage, the bulk of OpenLDK was written without the use of
LLMs. But recently I let Claude loose on the code to fix a few
remaining problems blocking kawa. Claude also upleveled the Java
support from Java 8 to Java 21.
I wrote a couple of blog entries related to this work that might be of
interest. One was around how I had to use the MOP to optimize method
dispatch in CLOS for clojure:
HTML [1]: https://github.com/atgreen/cl-clojure
HTML [2]: https://atgreen.github.io/repl-yell/posts/clos-mop-dispatch/
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
On OpenLDK, if it's able to run something like SweetHome3D at usable
speeds I would consider it a success and an interesting exercise.
rhkalth wrote 1 day ago:
And? Do you want a medal for plagiarizing other people's work?
klez wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
I'll bite. What have they plagiarized?
nxobject wrote 1 day ago:
The OpenLDK is very interesting - it looks like it âcompilesâ to
the vintage procedural dialect within CL (eg TAGBODY etc.) I wonder if
someoneâs ever bypassed the âprocedural Lispâ level and just used
a CL implementationâs internal assembler interactively, though. (IIRC
both SBCL and CCL expose theirs.)
stassats wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
I did that to write simd routines for sbcl: [1] Probably the best way
of writing assembly, can evaluate the function immediately, use
macros and any other code to emit instructions, even can print
register values (instruction-level stepping would be even better, but
too much work).
HTML [1]: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/code/arm64-simd...
varjag wrote 1 day ago:
TAGBODY/GO are broadly used in advanced Lisp macros. If you expand a
non-trivial extended LOOP invocation you'd likely see some.
If you compile to an implemenation's assembler (even where that
possible) you don't really compile into Lisp anymore. And really the
Lisp compiler is going to do a better job at generating machine code.
zombot wrote 1 day ago:
I haven't tried it, but the description sounds delightfully perverse.
And an LLM (Claude) cannot be embarrassed by perverting Lisp/Scheme
with Java.
brazzy wrote 1 day ago:
JVM, not Java. And there's Clojure already in that space.
Per_Bothner wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
Kawa predates Clojure by a decade. (Kawa work started 1996;
Clojure's initial release was 2007.) Also, Clojure isn't really
focused on high performance, while that has always been a priority
for Kawa, which generates bytecode similar to Java, especially if
you include suitable type annotations. (It is likely Clojure have
have improved in this respect - they have a lot more people working
on it.)
zombot wrote 4 hours 31 min ago:
Agreed, "Java" was an oversimplification. It's actually JVM
bytecode. It's still strange in my book to use an object soup
runtime for something (Lisp/Scheme) that feels closer to functional
languages to me.
Clojure is a different case, because when you already are on the
JVM anyway, then Clojure is still infinitely better than no Lisp at
all. It's not the same as putting the JVM somewhere where it wasn't
before and where it's not actually needed.
brazzy wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
A serious Lisp/Scheme runtime needs a garbage collector. The JVM
has probably the most advanced GC implementation around - for
that reason alone it doesn't seem particularly strange to me.
atgreen wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
It's like Dr Ian Malcolm says.. "Your developers were so
preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to
think if they should" - Jurrasic Park (almost)
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
The Computer Abstractions book/course for Scheme had some kind of VM
written in Java where you had to write an assembler in Scheme as the
final 'biggie' project.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Why should it?
"We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them
about halfway to Lisp." -- Guy Steele
anthk wrote 1 day ago:
RMS itself being a diehard Scheme and Elisp user said that he found
Java elegant over C. This was OFC long before Go and when C++ was
king in the 90's.
On Java itself, when CLOS, a dog-ancient system for Common Lisp
it's enough to support the Java class/method/object system by
itself tells a lot on how great CL can be, even with SBCL which is
the top tier free (as in freedom) interpreter/compiler out there.
On performance, well, who knows; remember that PyPy itself back in
the day was written in Python itself and it ran things much faster
than the vanilla Python interpreter.
DIR <- back to front page