Lisp linkdump, March 2011 edition.

Here's a bunch of links to interesting Common Lisp stuff I've come across lately:

EOS is a drop-in replacement for the FiveAM test framework which has no dependencies on external libraries (one of the dependencies of FiveAM is heavily implementation-specific and doesn't work on LispWorks 6, among other platforms). I've converted all my FiveAM projects to EOS, and recommend you do the same.

I've ported the Multilisp benchmarks from Marc Feeley's PhD dissertation to Eager Future2. Some of them tax your Lisp implementation a lot, and might reveal bugs. On my 32-bit x86 system, the only implementation to run all benchmarks to completion without segfaulting was SBCL. Try them on yours: load :test.eager-future2 and call benchmark.eager-future2:run-benchmarks.

Speaking of Marc Feeley, here is some other cool work he has been involved in:

Vincent St-Amour and Feeley came up with the PICOBIT R4RS Scheme, which can run Scheme programs in 256 bytes RAM and 8KiB of ROM total (including VM footprint) on PIC microcontrollers.

Feeley gave a talk about Gambit Scheme at ILC2010, and had a really great set of slides which you can get at http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/Gambit-inside-out.pdf (warning: 24MB PDF file!)

Common Lisp FORMAT continues to amaze. Peter Seibel pointed out Erik Naggum's cool hack for formatting dates on the Lisp-pro mailing list. I recently learned that instead of passing nil or t or a stream to FORMAT, you can pass a string with a fill-pointer, and "the output characters are added to the end of the string (as if by use of vector-push-extend)."

Jonathan Fischer wrote a good article about feeding binary data from Common Lisp to C.

Other things you can do with C is add s-expressions and macros - c-amplify does just that. c-amplify is motivated by the needs of game development, as was GOAL, Andy Gavin's Lisp system which powered the Jak & Daxter videogame franchise. Now there's a GPL-licensed attempt to create a GOAL-like environment called Score.

Other places besides C you can now run Lisp:

cl-gpu translates a subset of CL to CUDA GPU kernels. Arduino Lisp translates a subset of CL to a subset of C++ that can be compiled to run on the Arduino microcontrollers.

I keep promoting named-readtables (seriously, try it!), but Tobias C. Rittweiler has more cool libraries you should check out:

Hyperdoc provides a way for your Lisp library documentation have fancy Hyperspec-like lookup in SLIME.

Parse-Declarations is useful if you're building Lisp translators or code-walking tools.

There was a very interesting discussion of syntax and s-expressions on Hacker News; one of the things I learned is that according to X-bar linguistic theory, all natural languages basically consist of s-expressions. Of course the great thing about Common Lisp is, like natural languages, it is both homoiconic and its words have different meanings in different contexts. Alan Bawden came up with the "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" let quine of the Lisp world (another one of the cool things I learned from Doug Hoyte's Let Over Lambda).

If you've been looking for example code of large CL web applications, you should check out cl-eshop. cl-eshop currently runs the «ЦиFры» St. Petersburg store chain website and is licensed under the AGPL (Affero GPL).