I've uploaded Portable Aserve into Debian's development distribution. It integrates with Common Lisp Controller, so one can just type (require :aserve) and have acl-compat and aserve automatically compiled if necessary and then loaded.
John Desoi wrote UFFI support for MCL and OpenMCL. Today, I updated that code and merged it into the main UFFI source. Also, I've reworked CLSQL a fair bit so that it now runs on OpenMCL.
CLSQL and UFFI now support AllegroCL, Lispworks, CMUCL, and OpenMCL. At some point, I'd like to add support for SBCL.
I've updated the side table to include maintained web logs that discuss Lisp. Please forward to me other Lisp or Debian web logs that you think are valuable.
The short answer is 6.
I've recently adopted the openmcl package for Debian and have added Common Lisp Controller support for that compiler. At this point in Debian, CLC is supported by:
This is great: for any of the above implementations in Debian, I can just give the command (REQUIRE :LML) and have the LML package automatically compiled if necessary and then loaded.
I've recently become a Debian Application Manager. As such, I help test and guide people who want to become Debian Developers. You can learn more about being a Debian developer here.
I've moved all my web sites to Lisp source code and use LML to create the XHTML files for the web site. Using Common Lisp Controller, it's easy for me to test LML on a large number of CL implementations. As usual, testing LML on multiple platforms revealed that my code relied on some non-ANSI CL functionality of particular implementations. In the process of testing on multiple implementations, I found those instances of non-ANSI code and now have nice, portable code as a result.
I then ran a benchmark to compare the speed of implementations for this particular application. What surprised me is how well CLisp performed. CLisp, as opposed to other implementations, compiles to platform-independent byte-code rather than the native code of the CPU. In the benchmark results that I posted, Clisp performs brillantly. And, since CLisp works on nearly all CPU platforms that have a C-compiler, it's a good choice for me since I run Debian GNU/Linux on multiple CPU platforms.
To be fair to the other CL implemenations, my web site generation benchmark uses mostly uncompiled source (LML) code as the input. I believe that SBCL, in particular, spends a lot of time working on compiling the code before executing it.
I was asked to post an announcement for the International Lisp Conference 2002. It's looks to be a great conference. You can read about it at their web site.
I wish that I could attend!
One of my favorite Lisp programming books is Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. It's a great book for beginning to intermediate Lisp programmers as well as anyone who wants to do AI programming.
I've been waiting to purchase another book by Norvig called Artifical Intelligence: A Modern Approach. For the last 6 months, it's web site has been promising a second edition. Today, I saw that an availability date has finally been posted: Dec 15, 2002.
Great, another Common Lisp implementation now works with Common Lisp Controller. I've written support for clisp to use CLC. This works quite well with ASDF-based CLC systems. As I wrote before, I like using CLC to test my code with multiple Common Lisp implementations. Now, clisp can be added to that list of testing implementations.
Lisp Markup Language, LML, is a new package that I've released under the GPL license. I use it for creating all of my web sites. I find it is much more productive to use LML that to write straight HTML. If you try LML, consider sending me a message with your thoughts on the package.
Wow, lemonodor posted an announcement about this package before I did. Kudos to him.
ASDF, Another System Definition Facility, is a tool to automate the compilation and loading of complex Common Lisp systems. I've recently converted all of my system definition files from the venerable mk-defsystem 3.3 to ASDF.
I've been quite happy with the results. Especially now that I've added ASDF support to Common Lisp Controller (CLC). Rather than having to struggle with supporting logical pathnames on multiple Lisp implementations, the ASDF files with CLC don't have to embed any pathname at all.
This also eliminates the difference between a CLC'd package and a non-CLC'd package. Previously, a CLC'd package had to put the location of the CLC root directory in the system definition file. Thus, the one needed a different system definition file for a CLC and non-CLC package location. Now, with ASDF files, that is not necessary. The same .asd file can work from both inside and outside of CLC. This is good.