[erlisp-devel] Lightweight processes

[Dirk Gerrits]

Ivan Boldyrev wrote:
> On 9153 day of my life Dirk Gerrits wrote:
> 
>>The biggest problem with CPS in CL is (as far as I'm concerned) that you
>>can only do it to your own code, and not the implementation's.  So in
>>CPS-Erlisp you'll probably want to write
>>
>>(loop for x in very-long-list
>>      collect (f x))
>>
>>rather than
>>
>>(mapcar #'f very-long-list)
> 
> 
> Well, MAPCAR is easy to reimplement.

Yes, but it is also easy to avoid.

> Perhaps, it worth to implement special package ERCL, where such
> reimplemented functions will reside.  And force users to use only that
> functions in Erlisp programs.
> 
> ,----
> | (in-package #:ercl-user)
> | 
> | (defun test (f list)
> |   (mapcar f list))
> `----
> 
> Here DEFUN and MAPCAR are symbols from ERCL package, not CL.
> 
> Erlisp will contain large subset of CL with some extenstions.

I have considered and rejected this approach.

It's a lot of work (even when borrowing the code from an open-source 
Lisp implementation) and one gains very little.  (More pre-emption in 
standard Common Lisp functions.)  Also, this still won't fix all the 
other libraries out there that use :CL, not :ERCL.

> Perhaps, it worth to create number of branchs with different
> approaches.  It is experimental software (yet) anyway!

Certainly.  Different branches/subdirectories/whatever can be used to 
try several strategies at once.

Right now I'm experimenting with a CPS+trampolining approach on my 
laptop.  At this point I don't know if it's going to work at all, so I 
haven't uploaded it yet.  Once I'm more confident that it could be made 
to work I'll upload my patches.

Kind regards,

Dirk Gerrits