TMtmtvl·Aug 30, 2024
You mean something like generic-cl? https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl
In CIEL Is an Extended Lispalex-gutev
generic-cl
Common Lisp2019–2024
alex-gutev / generic-cl
generic-cl
Generic function interface to standard Common Lisp functions
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8Mentions
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164GitHub stars
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What it is
Generic function interface to standard Common Lisp functions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-06-22 14:56:48 UTC to 2024-08-30 17:57:36 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sources> And Lisp is almost uniquely able to handle transitions to later standards as I described above. You don't actually have to forfeit backwards compatibility entirely or at all if the changes are handled by moving to a new default base package. :cl-user/:cl become :cl##-user/:cl##
Go use cl21[0] if you care for this sort of thing.
> more generic functions would open up more interesting developments later
generic-cl[1]. But in a prefix-oriented language, I just don't see this as particularly important.
> you don't necessarily want to bless a particular concurrency model
You do[2]; this is one of the notable deficiencies in the cl standard that really bites, today. It is being worked on.
0. http://cl21.org/
1. https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl
2. https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf
In Emacs-like editors written in Common LispSo, the article is harsh on CL: YMMV. Also, your goal may vary: I want to build and ship (web) applications, and so far Julia doesn't look attractive to me (at all). Super fast incremental development, build a standalone binary and deploy on my VPS or ship an Electron window? done. Problem(s) solved, let's focus on my app please.
The author doesn't mention a few helpful things:
- editor support: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... Emacs is first class, Portacle is an Emacs easy to install (3 clicks), Vim, Atom support is (was?) very good, Sublime Text seems good (it has an interactive debugger with stack frame inspection), VSCode sees good work underway, the Alive extension is new, usable but hard to install yet, LispWorks is proprietary and is more like Smalltalk, with many graphical windows to inspect your r
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unning application, Geany has simple and experimental support, Eclipse has basic support, Lem is a general purpose editor written in CL, it is Emacs-like and poorely documented :( we have Jupyter notebooks and simpler terminal-based interactive REPLs: cl-repl is like ipython.
So, one could complain five years ago easily about the lack of editor support, know your complaint should be more evolved than a Emacs/Vim dichotomy.
- package managers: Quicklisp is great, very slick and the ecosystem is very stable. When/if you encounter its limitations, you can use: Ultralisp, a Quicklisp distribution that ships every 5 minutes (but it doesn't check that all packages load correctly together), Qlot is used for project-local dependencies, where you pin each one precisely, CLPM is a new package manager that fixes some (all?) Quicklisp limitations
> [unicode, threading, GC…] All of these features are left to be implemented by third-party libraries
this leads to think that no implementation implements unicode or threading support O_o
> most of the language proper is not generic
mention generic-cl? https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/ (tried quickly, not intensively)
Documentation: fair points, but improving etc. Example of a new doc generator: https://40ants.com/doc/
Also I'd welcome a discussion about Coalton (Haskell-like type system on top of CL).
If you want to regain performance, add-in type declarations, cl-generic will inline its functions: https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/#optimization
In State of the Common Lisp ecosystem, 2020> Common Lisp's worst feature is that it feels like just about everything imaginable has a catch.
You've put into words something I've struggled with saying for a while, and the exact reason I could never really enjoy working with Common Lisp.
The example I always return to is the lack of pervasive use of CLOS throughout the standard. Something like generic-cl[0] feels like it should be a baseline part of the language. As it is, it's a great library. But people are hesitant to even use it, because the result of making everything generic is a loss in performance!
Of course, [0] talks about optimizations they've done. I don't know how it compares to using the methods in the standard as opposed to the lib. Regardless, these libs only help when writing code, not reading it. Though don't get me wrong, that's a big deal! It's very helpful! But
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you wish everyone would play by those rules.
[0] https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl
Some bits are here:
- https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/ gives generic equality, predicates and other base functions.
- the https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ has nice topics and is growing.
- there is also http://cl21.org/, which works©, but is staling.
- to make an image, I think asdf:make is all one needs (see the Cookbook).
- Coalton is bring ML-types on top of CL.
- …
and I love CLOS.
> there are too many quirks in CL to appeal to people
I saw quirks at first. What was part of the learning process, I do wonder.
Last, there are many things we cannot do in Julia, like the Next browser :) https://github.com/next-browser/next
In Switching from Common Lisp to Julia (2017)To refresh your ideas on CL (I know I needed it): https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl There may be more libraries than you think. Also recently some usual complaints have been fixed:
- hard to set up environment ? -> http://portacle.github.io/ There's also Lem, and Atom is getting good. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
- horrible website ? http://common-lisp.net/ (they fixed it last year) Also http://lisp-lang.org/
- no cross-platform, featureful GUI library ? -> https://github.com/lispnik/iup/ (alpha) There's also Qtools for Qt4. And Ltk, but Tk lacks widgets.
- no object-oriented, generic math or equality operators ? -> https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/
- no decent library for numerical computing ? -> https://github.com/numcl/numcl
- waiting one month to publish your library into Quicklisp i
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s too much ? -> http://ultralisp.org/
- lack of online beginner friendly documentation ? -> https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/
To extend #'+, equality functions and much more, see https://github.com/alex-gutev/generic-cl/. See also https://github.com/pnathan/generic-comparability
In Ultralisp: A fast-moving Common Lisp software distribution