Category Archives: Computerworld

Lisp Machines

Some days ago I watched some Lisp Machine Videos. These films show what it was like to use a lisp machine and code on it.

I really have to admit that I was not surprised to see what wonderful ideas the guys had back then. Current OS’s still have a long way to go to incorporate (copy) the functionality you had 20 years ago in LispM Operating systems like Genera. Apple as always is on the front line of incorporating this old stuff. For example Time Machine. The new feature that will be there in Leopard (the next version of Mac OS X). The idea of easily going back in time and looking at your files was there 20 year ago.

Still as I now know Time Machine is still far away from the idea the LispM developers had. There you had a filesystem that had versioning built in. You can tell you do not save files just like that. You save patches to your files. That is somehow comparable to having SVN as your filesystem. Just a bit more sophisticated.

Sure that is not the only thing. There are tons of others. Like objects that are mouse sensitive depending on what you are doing. Accessing the displayed object structures that are behind that what you see. And many more…

I do not want to let myself get carried away too much. The condensed idea I wanted to share with you is the following. Genera is amazing. And if you think that any currently known OS is cool then you know nothing. And if you think that Java and Eclipse are cool then you live in the stone age in the matter of knowledge.

Sit down, learn lisp. It may hurt at first, but the freedom is worth it. Others had to pay their lives for freedom and you only have to learn.

Flashing M16C and R8C under Linux and Mac OS X

Lisp Interpreter in Java Script

Lisp in Todays Embedded World Investigation

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I continued my reading about Lisp and also searched the Web a bit more for anything related to Embedded Systems. I think that this is a pretty sad story.

I heard from a friend that I missed ecls in my last post. He said that it is possible to compile Lisp to C with it and then you can crosscompile the resulting C source to any architecture you like. But that simply does not feel right. That is only a hack. You miss the things you want the most (beside Lisp itself) REPL and with it the integrated inspector and debugger just like the profiler and tracer. Also you miss binary upload of functions. Think for yourself. If you do not have that things does development with lisp feel like it should? If you ask me it does not.

So I searched further. I knew that there was someone who developed the triple L, Mars and Venus. I did not know what it exactly was but I knew that it was a lisp development environment for embedded systems.

Looking more in depth in to that, I had to realize that the only thing that exists is the paper L – A Common Lisp for Embedded Systems (pdf format is here) by Rodney A. Brooks and Charles Rosenberg. This paper is telling a beautiful story about a development system that would be the thing one would like to have. But you can not get it anywhere! On the page of Charles Rosenberg you find the pointer that the company IS Robots (that was developing L, Mars and Venus) is now iRobot (yes the Roomba guys). Searching their site does not say anything about lisp though.

The only other person bringing iRobot together with Lisp is Lemindor I have not read all his posts yet but he does not really say anything that helps me neither.

I also asked about the topic in #lisp on freenode but it seems that the overall opinion is that everyone is brewing his own Lisp if he/her wants to use lisp on embedded system.

That is really bad news. I was hoping that there will be something I will be able to base on. The only solution that I see now is to take some common lisp implementation and port it to some embedded system. And when it works start changing it and splitting in parts so that it fits development on embedded systems. (you do not really want the compiler on your embedded system normally an interpreter is enough)

That somehow sounds pretty big and heavy. 🙁

The second solution would be to start with a small Lisp implementation by oneself. When you read Paul Graham’s article Roots of Lisp you get the feeling that it can not be that hard. But still I think that is probably a false feeling. But if I had the power and money to hire some people that are bright enough I think I would attack that. I even know some people that are bright and that would be able to create such thing but none of them would want to invest their time in such a project when they do not get money for that. So there is high possibility that Lisp on embedded systems will remain a dream. 🙁

Lisp on Embedded Systems

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I had a very inspiring conversation today. I was trying to lay out why one should learn Lisp. I found that there are tons of reasons why Lisp is superior to other Languages. But I found some articles in the web that can explain that much better then me. There are some Articles written by Paul Graham that describe the reasons beautifully. For example “If Lisp is So Great” or “Revange of the Nerds“. I can only encourage you to read them.

What I found very interesting is the main statement of these Articles. Popularity of a Language is not the same as greatness as very well explained in the second Article. Another statement is that programming languages are slowly closing up with functionality and paradigms found in lisp. That is also one of the reasons why I started learning it, because I heard about that trend some time ago somewhere in the big depths of the net.

Most articles are stating that Lisp is the way to go to create web applications and financial systems. But I would even go further. I think it is also the way to go for embedded systems. Some people may think that Lisp is too big and too slow to use it for development on embedded systems. But look at your cellphone. It will probably have a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) running on it. What is that thing? It is a full emulation of a system. It runs bytecode. It is slow like hell but people still develop applications for cellphones compleatly written in java. I bet that there are phones that have their entire software written in Java. Now we look at Lisp. I found a comparison between JDK and SBCL here. It really seems that Java is faster and uses up less memory in most cases. At least taking a glimpse on the Graph. But as I already posted before. SBCL is not perfect. But there are developments like “Headless” coming that will better up that situation. On another site I found that the commercial Allegro Common Lisp implementation is the fastest. But sadly I do not see any benchmarks anywhere. And it does not support any embedded system.

I think that even if the benchmarks show that Lisp may be less efficient in speed and memory usage, it is only a matter of time and dedication to change that. But what do you buy with that loss of efficiency anyways. You get a REPL (you can interact with everything in the running program) you get binary upload (you can change the code of a running program) you get macros.

But for the beginning we could start with something more simple then the full fledged Common Lisp on embedded. There is still L (a Common Lisp language subset specially designed for embedded systems) and Mars realtime kernel to run L on. I sadly have not found a project site for that only a paper. I ask myself how much of Lisp goodness it provides.

Next semester I will have to make a project in embedded systems and the topic is not yet fully set. But I hope that I will be able to work towards the target of running lisp on embedded systems. I already asked my Professor about the idea and he is not negative but he still wants to talk about it. So wish me luck. (also I hope that my partners for the project will be willing to work in that direction too)

If you have any pointers and ideas about this topic then do not hesitate. I will appreciate any pointer.

[Update] Corrected minor stylistic mistakes.

Compiling Binaries with sbcl

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There is one thing that you really want to have when you are creating programs. You want to create binaries. You can give them to others so that they can run them, without the hassle of compiling your programs by themselves, or you do not want them to see your sourcecode for some strange reason.

When you look at ruby, perl, python or even the all praised Java (do you hear the holy horns play? >_< ) you will see that you always need to install the appropriate one with tons of libraries so that you can run the scripts. I know I know ... I already see you running in my direction with your blades pulled out. There are compilers and packagers out there that can create binaries and you can even create a static binary that runs without the need of additional libraries. But think for yourself are these solutions good? Is it working well? I remember trying gcj. I had a test program of some hundred of very simple and standard java code. It was screaming very loudly "I am not ready to do that, I am too young!" perhaps it is better these days but I can not imagine that it works as it should. I also tried a perl to c converter but it was even more a mess. As you know I am playing around with lisp, common lisp to be exact. As most people I was thinking that it will be the same way it is with the languages mentioned above. But I could not be wrong more. There are compilers and today most of the implementations do not even have an interpreter. Most of them compile the code to at least bytecode. (I know ruby does that too, and Java too ... damn do not pick out every word I say separately) But sbcl for example (my implementation of choice for now) compiles everything. In CMUCL from which SBCL was inherited still has an interpreter additional to the compiler. I wanted to try out how it works with compiling a binary. I first thought that it will work just like with gcc or other command line batch compilers but I once more could not be wrong more. What you do is start SBCL load all libraries you need with "require" or "load" also load your program code and initialize everything you need. Then you run: (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die "my_binary" :executable t :toplevel 'main-program-function) After that you have "my_binary" on your disk and you can start it on every compatible machine. What it does is saving the state of the lisp with everything that is present at the time you run the command. When you leave out the :executable you get a core file that you can use to run with sbcl -core commandline parameter. The :executable command only adds to the core file the ability to be executed by the operating system. In fact sbcl binary is just this kind of core dump that was created at compiletime of sbcl. The :toplevel keyword says the save function which function should be called the next time the core gets loaded. In most cases it probably will be the main function of your program. But when you think about it a bit more you can imagine how much power it is to be able to say what function is the main function. 😉 (I know it from the lowlevel embedded programming side of the world 😉 ) But now comes up the Question. It is a coredump so what does it contain? Well there it comes. It contains everything. Really everything including all libraries and the lisp compiler. So when I compile the robots game I introduced in the previous post here I get a binary of 23MB (yes megabytes). That is pretty much. Sure it does not count if you have a really big system that is 100 times bigger but still that sucks somehow. I informed myself and now I know that there is something called "headless" in the works that will enable sbcl to create coredump with an integrated dynamic linker. This will make the binary significantly smaller and when you run your program it will dynamically link the libraries it needs. Just as it should be. Next thing is from the slime world. There is a profiler in the works that will be able to even more optimize the code so that you will be able to create really small binaries. All that is of course only SBCL other, commercial lisp implementations, like LispWorks or Allegro, already have very efficient mechanisms to create such binaries. But as long as you do not need that stuff immediately you can stay on the open source side of the world. 😉

I hope that was interesting, and also hope to get some comments. That would encourage me to write more…

Robots in Lisp

Common Lisp

1 Reply

Some time ago I listened to a Chaos Radio Express podcast dealing with Dylan.

Dylan is a pretty nice language developed by a research group leaded by Apple Computers. The idea was to create a better lisp language. One of the biggest changes was a switch from the S-Format syntax that marks lisp to an Algol like syntax most of you know from C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby and so on.

After hearing that podcast I had to try it but did not come far somehow.

I also told a friend of mine that I was checking out Dylan and he told me that I should try lisp. I did not care at that moment. Last friday I was curious and asked him to give me pointers about Lisp. I got a pretty big list where I should look and what I should get. The best pointer was Practical Common Lisp.

Practical Common Lisp is a book that is available free in the internet (you can also buy it as treeware). I installed sbcl and slime(do not wonder if the link to slime is not working, at the moment I am writing this the guys of common-lisp.net have some problems with their dns, but you can still reach the site using the ip 80.68.86.115 on my shiny new MacBookPro 17″ and started reading.

I tell you that book is amazing and lisp even more.

I can only encourage you to try it. REPL (Read Evaluate Print Loop) is the best thing ever. The integrated debugger interface, REPL and slime mode for emacs provided by the Slime package is beautiful!

It is really difficult to describe why. It just feels right and is mighty. Take a look by yourself and you will be shocked why Java, Perl or even Ruby are used so much. Lisp just rules and not only for scientific stuff.

I will write try to write something more in depth later.

VIM7 Fun

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At work I have to use a pretty nasty Windows based development environment for a microcontroller.

You can configure it so that it starts a text editor of your liking to edit the source files. This editor gets called when you click on a file or on an error message in the compiler output. The DE also accepts a setting for parameters to the editor. There are two meta character codes. One is for the file (%F) and the second for the line the editor should jump to (%L). The problem is that it uses the same settings for the error invocation as for the normal file opening.

I wanted to use VIM7 and the new nice feature of tabs. As vim also supports remote invocation I decided that I want the DE to open the files in one central vim instance.

It took me some time to find out the correct command line setting so I want to share it with you.

gvim –servername <some_distinct_name> –remote-tab-silent +0%L %F

Now some explanations.

–servername is needed so that it always finds the correct vim window.

— remote-tab-silent is a directive that vim should start editing the file provided by %F in a remote window in a new tab if the file is not yet being edited. The “silent” addition makes vim not yield an error if there is no vim instance running yet, and start a new instance by itself.

The +0%L is there so that when %L is there vim jumps to that line but when %L is empty it does not jump to the end of file but to the beginning. That is why the 0 is there.

Ok I hope it is useful for someone. Have fun with VIM 😉

Update: Corrected the unvisible some_distinct_name 😉

VIM7 Released