Re: Lisp as a procedural language?

On Oct 19, 2008, at 1:27 PM, Douglas McNaught wrote:

> SBCL is a big and very sophisticated program.  It's designed to be a
> self-contained Lisp system and has (AFAIK) no concessions to
> "embeddability".  It uses threads internally, and plays games with the
> memory map to make GC more efficient.  Only a small part of it is
> written in C, and the rest is Lisp compiled directly to binary. It
> would almost certainly be a heroic project to make it coexist with a
> PostgreSQL backend process--like Java, but much worse.
>
> It's not likely that any of the "serious" Common Lisp systems would be
> easily embedded in Postgres.


Probably the ideal implementation would be ECL:

http://ecls.sourceforge.net/

It is designed to be a full Common Lisp implementation that can be  
easily embedded in other environments.

It generates C source code so you could have the option of developing  
with Lisp and then generating C language functions for additional  
speed or source code security.

Not open source, but I've played around a bit with integrating  
LispWorks to get Lisp a procedural language.

I'd like to see Lisp as a procedural language, but I'm not very  
proficient with C. If anyone is interested in leading the way, I would  
be happy to help.


John DeSoi, Ph.D.