Newbie question: Interpreted CL

Hi all,

I've read somewhere recently that some people use CLISP for development but not for production. Ignoring the licensing, is this due to the fact that an interpreted implementation of CL is much friendlier for development than a compiled one? In a compiled one you need to recompile all forms that use a macro when you redefine it, right? Is this much of an issue?

Thanks!

abc wrote:I've read somewhere recently that some people use CLISP for development but not for production.

I read that too, but I am not sure how widespread this is in practice. As far as I can tell most people use the same implementation for production and development.

abc wrote:Ignoring the licensing, is this due to the fact that an interpreted implementation of CL is much friendlier for development than a compiled one?

I don't think that is particularly true. In addition, I believe that Slime is mostly developed with SBCL, which means that it integrates better. CLISP might be better if one is attempting to use the naked terminal, since it uses readline and the non-slimeified debugger is slightly easier to handle in CLISP.

abc wrote:In a compiled one you need to recompile all forms that use a macro when you redefine it, right? Is this much of an issue?

It is very rarely an issue in my experience, because macros are rare enough and changed rarely enough that it is easy to just reload the entire system when they are changed. There is also slime-recompile-xref and slime-recompile-all-xrefs, which along with slime-who-macroexpands can recompile all expansion sites automatically.

Just to note, CLISP does compile. It just compiles to bytecode. You can even compile a complete binary image.

Aha.

Thanks!

SLIME also works fine with CLISP. From our past implementation usage poll, you can see that SBCL is far-and-away the most-used implementation. As with all other technology, this means that it tends to have the best compatibility with any other random component, but that in no-way suggests that the other implementations won't work. In fact, CLISP is my favorite Windows implementation currently (though I'm starting to look at CCL for that).