Ask HN: Production Lisp in 2020?

222 points

6 years ago

I have gone through initial chapters of "Practical Common Lisp"[1] and "Loving Common Lisp" [2], and have a bit of intuition on lisp, and the power of macros. Haven't done any projects yet, but was also researching on real issues faced by adopting lisp, and ran into articles about abandoning lisp [3], adopting lisp [4],[5]. Could not find anything more recent; but what they mention in these articles - even the ones that are adopting lisp talk about issues like:

* poor ecosystem of libraries - few gems, most other half-baked

* poor community coordination

* Dependency management limitations with quicklisp

And some specific red flags like:

* poor support for json[6] * poor support for async

* have to restart the server every 20 days because of some memory leak [3]

* hack to tune GC [5]

If you are using lisp in production for non-trivial cases, do these issues still exist? is there a way you can quantify effort is resolving them, and if yes, what is it? and, finally, if you had to re-do your project, would you chose lisp or something else?

[1]: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

[2]: https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp/read#quicklisp

[3]: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/why-turtl-switched-from-...

[4]: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/why-deftask-chose-common...

[5]: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...

[6]: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/#s4...

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