[cl-containers-devel] cl-containers

[Faré]

Dear Gary and cl-containers developers,

Eric O'Connor and I are a bit sick of the situation
regarding data-structure libraries in CL.
There are tens of implementation of any given implemented data-structure,
most of them of less-than-stellar quality,
all the while plenty of useful data-structures are not implemented at all.
And it's a huge pain any time one wants to find a library
(though the pain is somewhat alleviated by quicklisp).

Therefore, Eric and I are considering doing some work of consolidation
around CL datastructure libraries.
Our goal is to have one library that provides all the interfaces
(generic functions, macros) to all the datastructures that anyone may want,
then separate libraries to implement these interfaces.
For compatibility, these could be distributed as part of the same tarball.

Separately (or not), we'd develop some library for pure datastructures
that would try to maintain some kind of
API coherence with the stateful variants.

Your cl-containers looks like
the best-factored of the existing datastructure libraries,
as far as stateful algorithms go. Are you still maintaining it?
Are you accepting patches and/or co-maintainers who would perform some surgery
on the library to split it into interface and implementations,
and add implementations to missing datastructures (such as fibonacci heaps),
and add thread-safe variants of various datastructures, etc.
All the while we'd seek to preserve backwards compatibility.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Cubans bemoan the three failures of the revolution: breakfast, lunch and dinner