a CONS is an object which cares

Upcoming presentation about Parenscript

2012-01-18T17:06:00.001-07:00

I'm going to be giving a talk about Parenscript to the Montreal Scheme/Lisp Users Group on Thursday, January 19 (meeting details here).

The slides I'm going to be using are here, and a list of links referenced in the talk is below. The last time I gave a presentation on Parenscript was to LispNYC in 2007. Parenscript has received a huge number of changes and improvements since then, and continues to be the best language/compiler to JavaScript and one of the best tools available for web application development. What's also new since 2007 are libraries and tools that extend Parenscript: Red Daly has added CLOS and the Common Lisp condition system to JavaScript as a Parenscript library, and there are now several options for interactive development with SLIME in your browser.

Links:

Montreal Scheme/Lisp Users Group back in action

2011-11-28T13:44:00.003-07:00

After a long hiatus, the Montreal Scheme/Lisp Users Group (MSLUG) is back to regular meetings, with the latest one taking place November 24.

Marc Feeley gave two talks, the first presenting his experiences adapting the Gambit Scheme implementation into the Gambit REPL Scheme interpreter app for iOS (most of the difficulties seemed to revolve around the Apple app store screening process). (slides)

Then Marc showed and discussed a demo doing distributed computing using mobile, serialized continuations bouncing around Gambit instances on x86 Macs and ARM-based iPhones/iPods. The slides are well worth checking out, particularly for insight into how serialization of problematic objects like I/O streams/ports is done.

There's at least one Common Lisp project (cl-walker) that claims to be able to serialize continuations, and another library (Storable Functions) which claims to be able to serialize closures (from which you can get continuations with a CPS transformer); I haven't tried either and to my knowledge there hasn't been any works done on mobile continuations for Common Lisp, or that much work for mobile code in CL in general.

The next MSLUG meeting is tentatively January 19th; I'm scheduled to present a talk on Parenscript.

Optional dependencies

2011-11-05T15:11:00.001-06:00

Both uri-template and css-lite provide optional support for generating JavaScript templates via Parenscript. However, I did not want to make Parenscript a required dependency for either library.

Previously, this was implemented using the #+parenscript read-time conditional in the source files.

That worked ok if you loaded Parenscript before loading css-lite, but there were two problems:

If you initially compiled css-lite without loading Parenscript first, you'd need to go back and re-compile css-lite by hand after loading Parenscript if you wanted the JavaScript output.
If you loaded the css-lite fasls compiled with Parenscript into a fresh Lisp image without loading Parenscript first, you'd get an error.

Both of these error stem from the fact that ASDF didn't know anything about the optional Parenscript dependency.

Didier Verna has written about optional ASDF dependencies previously (make sure to read the asdf-devel thread on optional dependencies Didier links to if you're interested in this). In short, relying on ASDF's :weakly-depends-on seems quite hairy.

I think I found a simple alternate solution for uri-template that seems to work: put all the Parenscript-dependent code into one file, and then use read-time conditionals in the uri-template.asd list of files like so:

:components ((:file "package")
             ...
             (:file "destructure-uri")
             #+parenscript (:file "parenscript-implementation")
             )

You can see the full implementation in the latest patch to uri-template.

Let me know if you have any ideas about this technique, or optional dependencies in general.