[cl-utilities-devel] cl-utilities status and plans

[Peter Scott]

On 3/14/07, Joao Galamba <joao.galamba at runbox.com> wrote:
> First of all, thanks for setting up and developing this project.  Being a newbie lisper and already having syntoms of NIH sindrome, regrettably I only found  about cl-utilities a few weeks ago and so still haven't had a chance to use it in my own projects.

Welcome, newbie lisper!

> Like (most probably) every other lisp programmer, I already have my own (very large) collection of utilities. Although, I collected most of them from external resources (Graham's OnLisp and ANSI CL, Seibel's PCL, come to mind) I still feel a bit suspicious about those utilities in terms of correctness, robustness, performance and generalization. In that respect cl-utilities seems much more interesting and trustworthy.

Yes, I've put a lot of polish into cl-utilities. That's what took up
most of the development time, in fact.

> So, what's cl-utilities current status? Is it being maintained/developed? What new utilities do you plan to introduce (I can think of a few)? And what is the criteria? Do you plan to merge it with another project?

Current status: I haven't heard many new ideas for cl-utilities, but
I'm open to suggestions. Bear in mind that cl-utilities is supposed to
be for the kind of semi-standard things that everybody writes anyway,
and not for controversial things like the anaphoric macros (aif,
awhile, etc.). Right now, the code is pretty stable and mature; I
haven't touched it in months, but I used it just earlier today.

If you can think of some new utilities you'd like to see added, that's
great! Just post the ideas on the mailing list, and if you have code
it would be doubly appreciated.

I have no plans right now to merge cl-utilities with anything. It
would be nice if some of the other utility packages like kmrcl would
copy-and-paste some of the (public domain!) cl-utilities code for
things like COMPOSE and WITH-GENSYMS.

-Peter