Mau Things

Lisp feels so irrelevant in game dev (desktop, non-mobile). C++ dominates this field. Flash successors plenty abound. XNA alternatives all around. Even Java is there. But where is Lisp?

Naughty Dogs

FF7

Kandria

...?

Let's be honest. These are not success stories. These list feels more like they use Lisp because they are extremely familiar with it. The fact that Naughty Dogs used Lisp doesn't mean Lisp is viable - it just means they have built extensive tooling around it; it is their secret sauce, and they will not share it (it is their rice bowl after all). No games or companies (on the Sony platform) before or after them used Lisp in a major way. It is probably not practical.

And furthermore, with the explosion of indie gaming some time ago, no notable Lisp games was released. Lisp is supposed to be the secret weapon for single developers or small teams - yet I see none of it.

On performance, it is said that Lisp can be 1.5-3x performance of C, and there are even claims that it can go faster than C because the compiler + runtime are included. Now, on the "faster than C part", it's quite hard to believe, when Java with tons of engineering work, finds it quite hard to be on par with C.

Now, that being said, I present my pet peeves.

Lisps might need a lot of effort to reach "close-to-C" speed. Java can have moderately decent programmers with low to moderate effort, and produce "close-to-C" speed. That is the true achievement of Java in my opinion. I don't have to be damn fucking smart or spend a lot of time to achieve great performance, memory safety, easy-to-read code, and more, with just higher memory usage. And these days, I suspect it is even lower than SBCL if you limit memory and use parallel GC. That is a feat that is hard to beat.

What about C++? Lisp can reach "close-to-C" speed. There are claims that Lisps can beat C in speed because of compiler + runtime. Those are only claims. C++ has already beat C in performance, with zero overhead, using a poor mans macro (C++ template) https://stackoverflow.com/a/18004168.

On to the word "tooling", Lisp developers consider tooling as the ability to extend the language, create constructs that are simply not possible in other languages. In the rest of the world, tooling means... tooling.

Like the macro LOOP. If this is tooling, then it is a fucking monstrosity. We all have limited mental capacity. If my program is going to have multiple LOOP-like mental usage, well.. fuck me.

Toolings are like.. IDEs. And sometimes they are so damn good it is not even funny. But the most important thing they do is to reduce your mental load, by being as smart as possible. Tooling does the work, you do the coding. I sometimes wonder if IDE users realize you can do 99.9% of the same things with... | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)

And since I like Java, I will just say some things. Java the language is hilariously weak compared to Lisp, but the runtime, ecosystem, tooling, everything far outshines current Lisps. And the Java language are clearly designed by level-headed geniuses - at least they never claim that Java is the best full stop. Well, I consider them geniuses when I read Brian Goetz, Aleksey Shipilëv, or Ron Pressler when it comes to Java.

And while there is a saying that Java needs a state-of-the-art GC because of all the garbage it produces.. well it is also because of this GC that you can have highly performant code with mediocre code, that won't blow your memory.

The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even th... | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)

JVM Anatomy Quark #11: Moving GC and Locality (shipilev.net)

Java is better than C++ for high speed trading systems | Hacker News (ycombinator.com)

A few more links to show why I feel these people are so delusional. If only they were more pragmatic

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37458188

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006777 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006777&p=2, search for lisp

Common Lisp has many implementations, but

More like many incompatible implementations - they may implement all, but have different ideas about non-standards like FFI, threads, and what not

Libraries like Bordeaux-Threads, CFFI, Closer-MOP actually tries to provide a baseline for ALL implementations, just look at all the #+ in the code - reading the libraries feels like reading how every implementation does things

When they say there's a lot of libraries, this is not what I have in mind - if standardising features across implementations is a library, then I have nothing much to say

If you are creating an application (not designing a library), the libs above are actually not helpful as they are another layer on top of the implementation itself

Other implementations are problematic

https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/15maush/clozure_cl_1122/

https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp no Windows binary release since 2010, developer refuses to support MingW 64bit, GPL program

On Lispworks

Lispworks has GUI, tree shaker, ability to create shared libraries, and good support, but..

It costs way too much - USD 3,000 for 64-bit Windows, or about MYR 14,000. Daylight robbery. If I want a great GUI designer, there is JFormDesigner, one time purchase of USD 179. Intellij reaches price parity at 29 years.. the entire Jetbrains suite reaches price parity at 17 years..

Lispworks have Hobbyist starting at USD 750.. but anyone trying to justify that other hobbies also cost this much is missing a huge point - most hobby allows them to resell their stuffs, and you can even do commercial stuffs with it. I am pretty sure that you cannot sell back your license, and can only upgrade, which is paying another USD 2250..

Whereas Jetbrains has Intellij and PyCharm community edition - awesome products, free, and can be used for commercial purposes

All Lisp follows a standard, so it is portable/stable/etc

More like dead. No one bothers to standardise threads, C ffi, etc

The language has a lot of unnecessary nesting thanks to let/flet and friends - I can also use https://quickdocs.org/serapeum and use the macro local, but this library pulls 19 libraries, one of them Slime, which is used for .. I actually don't know why it is needed, isn't Slime used for interacting with Emacs???

https://portability.cl/ doesn't seem portable to me

Library situation is still bad

No implementation comes with GUI. Quite bad considering how having many implementations is considered a good thing (actually there are ABCL but that's cheating)

I am looking for https://docs.python.org/3/library/cmd.html, I see that https://github.com/vindarel/replic is a good library, and is MIT licensed. But it uses GNU Readline, which is definitely GPL. replic depends on cl-readline, which is GPL. So.. isn't replic supposed to be GPL because of its dependency on GNU Readline? The author owns the code for replic and cl-readline, but not GNU Readline

Out of the box, almost all the implementations doesn't come with batteries. (Racket included, as a user say it comes with a retrofittable fusion battery pack)

When I think of batteries included, I think of this.

I am looking for game development

I see xelf, it asks for SDL.dll, and a bunch of other dlls, which I have to supply. SDL1 last update was around 2013

This is one where "stable" or "will work for decades" fails badly

I see SDL2, it asks for SDL2.dll

I see raylib, it wants to compile C stuffs (which I did not install). Why??

I see Trial, I see the docs, I feel dumb

On the other hand

pip install pygame-ce, look at docs, viola

pip install raylib, copy starter code, viola

Download gdx-liftoff, generate project, open in Intellij, viola

The docs for these game libs are so easy to read, and all of them includes the DLLs required

Why don't Common Lisp stuffs include the DLLs? You expect me to put it in the Systems folder? Expect me to use Linux and apt install sdl/whatever? The idea that I "use Linux for easy development and then compile using Wine" is insane

And best practices..

https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml

I might as well use C++ and read http://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines, even Lisps programs eventually need to interface C stuffs, and Python can use nanobind with great effect

As to why I say C++ when talking about interfacing C, it is because these days, the world is built in C++

And more links

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29017710

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26065511

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28040351

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37458188

Please don’t assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bio-informatics, B2B and Ecommerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list. – Kent Pitman