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4:08:58
beach
I am almost done preparing my slides for ELS. After that, I can go back to more interesting stuff.
6:26:54
beach
nyef: I think it is good that you participate in this discussion on #lisp, because you are one of the few people qualified to have an opinion that I would respect. I am staying out because there are some other people I would rather not discuss with, and who have a tendency to put words in my mouth.
6:32:01
nyef
One question did come to mind earlier on, though: About how far is SICL from being able to produce a standalone implementation, even if it's "just" a target-compiled environment?
6:34:08
nyef
Hunh. x86oid backend and all, or is that one of the things that would need bootstrapping?
6:35:28
beach
I have decided to complicate things for myself by using the full language in the implementation of core components such as CLOS and the compiler. So, bootstrapping requires the introduction of CLOS first, which has not been done before.
6:36:12
beach
I recently extracted the assembler to a separate repository, but in the past, I have been able to generate x86-64 machine code from SICL functions.
6:38:30
beach
I bootstrap by creating a SICL CLOS environment in a first-class global environment inside SBCL. But it requires several steps. My plan is to create a graph in memory and then create a homomorphic one as an x86 executable.
6:38:48
nyef
Yeah, I always thought your choice to use CLOS as a fundamental component was brave. I do hope that you can make it work.
6:39:22
beach
I think I can. It is just that it requires a lot of attention to detail. But that's part of the fun of the thing.
6:39:26
nyef
I'm fairly sure that, were I writing my own Lisp implementation from scratch, I wouldn't be using CLOS at quite that low a level.
6:40:14
beach
Right. And I am doing it because I am a researcher, and doing something completely new like this is one way of justifying my salary.
6:40:35
nyef
There's been some interesting stuff recently with the SBCL GC, btw. Not necessarily groundbreaking, but some optimization work.
6:45:59
jackdaniel
I have more humble plans for the future, I want to make work native ECL's GC as an option
6:46:20
nyef
Aside from SBCL's atrocious out-of-address-space failure mode, simply having a moderate amount of thread turnover will kill it.