HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
binghe
PCL
Common Lisp2018–2024
binghe / PCL

PCL

Portable CommonLoops for modern CL platforms (unfinished work)

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
2Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
72GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Portable CommonLoops for modern CL platforms (unfinished work)

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

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.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-08-02 13:17:51 UTC to 2024-10-14 07:16:18 UTC.

0122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
lispm·Oct 14, 2024
> Nobody will use Genera without Zmacs or the error handler (aka Debugger)… Nobody will run Genera without TCP/IP and a lot of other stuff. The error handler is not the same anymore. > you can take the Dynamic listener or even DW and have it running on a MIT system without much work I think that's pure fantasy. > Genera was carefully designed to keep compatibility with the MIT system. I don't think that was a goal, given that the MIT system was not relevant anymore and the vendors all had their own forks. TI converted much of the old code to Common Lisp with a translator. Symbolics wrote most new code in Common Lisp. Without an extensive implementation of Common Lisp incl. CLOS, basically nothing runs on the old system. The times of a few conditional reader macros was soon over. Does Portable Common LOOPS (PCL) run on the MIT Lisp Machine
Read the rest
? https://github.com/binghe/PCL/tree/master/impl It lacks a port, but there are ports to TI and Symbolics. That should be simple.
In Common Lisp implementation of the Forth 2012 Standard
lispm·Oct 16, 2018
> Maxima uses Common Lisp Maxima is a direct port of Macsyma to Common Lisp and has been maintained in CL since the mid 80s. But it has not been re-architectured to take advantage of the many improvements in CL. Macsyma took advantage of the backwarts-compatibility of CL to Maclisp. > The source code problems are a reflection of Lisp as is the source code of other major Lisp programs still being actively maintained Many other Lisp programs have radically different source code / architecture from Macsyma. Check out the architecture of Reduce or Axiom. Maxima itself implements a language on top of Lisp. Reduce is written in Portable Standard Lisp (PSL). It uses an algebraic Lisp (without s-expression syntax), written in (PSL). Axiom implements an advanced statically typed language on top of Lisp and the original implementation makes EXTENSI
Read the rest
VE use of literate programming. If you want to see what actual CL specific code looks like, you would need to look at code bases which have been architectured for CL - after end 80s / early 90s onwards, when CLOS and a bunch of other things was added to the language. One of the early great code bases for CL was the prototype implementation of CLOS with a meta-object protocol: Portable Common LOOPS. https://github.com/binghe/PCL There is a book which describes a simpler implementation - but with still quite nice code: The Art of the Meta-object Protocol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Metaobject_Prot... https://github.com/binghe/closette > It is more about how you go about your development and how you document your than about the language you use to write your code. Lisp is called a programmer amplifier. Unfortunately bad programmers get amplified, too. The software engineering research has had the goal to create better programming languages. That let to Pascal, Ada, ... and a bunch of other languages. Lisp is the exact opposite. Lot's of freedom. With freedom comes responsibility. I have seen great Lisp code bases and also stuff I could not understand (basically write-once code). For me the ability to write extremely descriptive Lisp code is a huge attraction. But I know that one can easily write large programs which are hard to understand - and not just because they lack documentation.
In How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
lispm·Aug 2, 2018
Somehow. The original first CLOS implementation called PCL (Portable CommonLoops) was written in 100% Common Lisp with very little implementation specific CL code. PCL was a library which ran on at least 15 different Common Lisp implementations. What really is a myth that it's (only) macros. That CLOS implementation is a complex library written as data types, functions, macros, ... and which was bootstrapped to be partly written in itself using classes, method, generic functions, ... See for example: https://github.com/binghe/PCL
In Paul Graham on SICP (2000)

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.